Housekeeping

This guide will never be finished. Compliance Frameworks are dynamic in nature and we’ll be forever updating it. Therefore, we are constantly turning to you, our readers, for input. You are our test pilots, our critiquers, and sometimes our fellow writers. The community for this book can be found by accessing the Discussion Forum link in the header. We welcome your input! Anyone who contributes a significant amount will be listed as a contributing editor. Anyone who takes the lead in authoring a section will be listed as a contributing author.

A great deal of what we are sharing here is patented. As a matter of record, one of our contributors, the Unified Compliance team, have a couple hundred patent claims – too many to be listed here. Their patents are listed on their patent page at https://theucf.info/patents. If you so choose to create your own compliance framework or update your compliance framework to use schemas and structures covered by their patents (or any other organization that we list patents for) – great! We ensure all GRCschema.org contributors have a very frugal patent license just for that (see their respective patents pages for more info).

Don’t trust us!

How’s that for starting a guide? Hah!

Yeah, you shouldn’t trust us. Or anyone else for that matter. You should trust only what you can verify. Only what makes sense.

Therefore, the first thing we are going to do is lay out our methodology for this work.

Our research methodology

First and foremost, all our research for this guide is being maintained in a Zotero research library that you can access for free. You can access that library at https://theucf.info/BK0001.

We are going directly to the sources, finding literature, and engaging in communications. If you are reading this and you are one of the people responsible for a compliance framework, you might see portions of the conversations we’ve had within this book or on our research sites online. If you are a consumer of a compliance framework, and we’ve asked you a question or sent you a survey, you’ll see the results of those, too.

If you want to participate in the discussion, add content, etc., please do so by starting with participating in the Discussion Forum found HERE.

Thank you, and happy learning!