License, Authorship, and Independence

Authorship, license, and independence

Who wrote this, and on what terms

About the author

Dr. Perry Ho

Dr. Perry Ho holds a Doctor of Business Administration from the University of Newcastle, Australia, an MBA from the University of Hawaii, and a B.S. from Brigham Young University, Hawaii. His research and practice focus on how large infrastructure programs succeed or fail at the interface between a facility and the systems and communities that host it — the question Founding Paper No. 001 sets out to make measurable. He has spent over 25 years working on infrastructure, capital deployment, and multi-stakeholder program execution across Asia, North America, and Europe, advising senior executives, government leaders, and institutional investors. He is fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, and is based in Utah.

InfrastructureHealth.org is an independent initiative founded by Dr. Perry Ho, who is also the author of Founding Paper No. 001. The author discloses a commercial interest: he is a co-founder of AeroSphereTech, an infrastructure development venture. That interest is disclosed here for the same reason it is disclosed throughout the paper: a measurement framework proposed by someone with a stake in what it measures should be read with that in mind, and should be built so that it can be checked. This site and Founding Paper No. 001 are funded personally by the author.

Three commitments follow from it. The framework text — the definition, the six dimensions, the indicators, the measurement rules, and the evidence grades — is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: anyone may use, adapt, and build on it, for any purpose, including in competition with its author. No term in the framework is trademarked. And should the framework ever mature into a certification, that certification will not be owned by the author's venture — under US certification-mark law, the owner of a certification may not supply what it certifies, which makes the independence the paper promises a legal requirement rather than a courtesy. The openness is of the standard, not a waiver of authorship: the definition and method are free for anyone to use, while authorship of Founding Paper No. 001 and any specific reference implementation remain with their authors — which is precisely what lets the standard be checked against, and used independently of, any one implementation.

A reviewer should be able to reject the author's implementation entirely and still accept the framework.