Protective Legitimacy Score (PLS) — Operational Rubric v1.0-rc1

STATUS: Community Review Draft — Structured Feedback Invited

This release candidate establishes a formally auditable and reproducible scoring methodology for evaluating system implementations against Protective Computing principles under conditions of human vulnerability.

Canon Layer: Measurement & Audit (Layer 3 of the Protective Computing Canon — Core Documents v1)

The Protective Legitimacy Score (PLS) operationalizes six protective principles:

• Reversibility
• Exposure Minimization
• Local Authority
• Coercion Resistance
• Degraded Functionality
• Essential Utility

Each principle is translated into explicit, testable level criteria (0–4), aggregated into weighted composite scores (0–100), and supported by worked examples, anti-gaming safeguards, and non-negotiable hard-fail guards.

The methodology is evidence-based. Claims do not generate score. Verifiable system behavior generates score. Each scoring criterion requires reproducible demonstration rather than declarative compliance.

Hard-fail guards prevent numerical manipulation and structural misrepresentation. Systems that include undisclosed backdoors, essential-path paywalls, weak verification boundaries, coercion-blind disclosure models, or other structural violations automatically fail regardless of composite numeric output.

Worked examples demonstrate full scoring methodology by comparing:

• Conventional cloud-dependent architecture — PLS: 15.25 (Non-legitimate)
• Protective local-first implementation — PLS: 87.75 (Strong legitimacy)

These examples are included to make the scoring logic transparent, reproducible, and independently testable.

Review Window

The review period remains open for two weeks from publication date.

The objective of this review cycle is structural stress-testing of the rubric prior to normative release (v1.0).

Feedback Requested On

• Principle criteria clarity and operational testability
• Worked example arithmetic and procedural accuracy
• Anti-gaming safeguard resilience
• Hard-fail guard completeness and boundary definition
• Weighting schema justification (16/18/18/18/15/15)
• Potential unintended optimization surfaces

Submission Channels

• GitHub Issues: https://github.com/CrisisCore-Systems/pain-tracker/issues
• Community discussion: https://protective-computing.github.io/

All substantive feedback will be logged and addressed in a documented revision note accompanying v1.0.

This rubric forms part of the Protective Computing Canon — Core Documents v1, alongside:

• The Overton Framework v1.3 — Foundational Theory
• Protective Computing Field Guide v0.1 — Operational Translation

Together, these documents establish the theoretical, operational, and evaluative foundations of Protective Computing as a discipline.

The final normative release (v1.0) will be published following completion of the independent review cycle and documented integration of validated feedback.