How the Standards Are Written

SynC writes and maintains every standard in the library. Each standard is drafted from cited sources under published authoring rules, reviewed before adoption, and corrected in the open. Direct contribution to the library is closed.

A SynC standard is built from public sources: consensus standards (ASTM, ANSI, IEEE, UL, NEMA, NFPA, the NEC, the IBC, ACI, ASHRAE), public-domain government guide specifications, building codes, and manufacturer technical data mined for facts and written manufacturer-neutral. It never reproduces a proprietary specification system or a manufacturer's guide-form specification.

Every standard is written to the same rules, which are published in full on Standards Markup SyntaxResolves to the current adopted revision.about/standards-markup-syntax:

• Manufacturer-neutral. Functional requirements and performance, never a brand. If a requirement is true only because one manufacturer's product happens to meet it, it is not a standard.
• Project-ready. What a working engineer can put on a real project, not an outline. Where a requirement needs a value, the standard gives the value or exposes it as a datasheet field for the project to decide.
• Configurable, not duplicated. Where projects legitimately differ, the difference is a datasheet field on one standard, not two competing standards.
• Grounded. Where a requirement traces to a code, a consensus standard, or established practice, the standard says so.

A standard is a living document, and the projects that cite it need something fixed. Revisions give both.

Every save creates a new revision. The record holds what changed, element by element, with a summary and a SHA-256 content fingerprint identifying exactly what was saved. Earlier revisions are never overwritten, so any change can be read, compared, or traced.

A revision is reviewed before it is adopted. The adopted revision is the one projects cite and import. Until a revision is adopted it is part of the standard's open history, visible to anyone reading it, and not the current adopted text. Errors found after adoption are corrected in the open: an erratum on the adopted revision, a corrected revision, or an entry in the moderation log.

Every standard, and every revision of one, is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You may read, copy, share, and adapt it, including commercially, on one condition: when you share it or something made from it, credit SynC Standards, link to the license, and say whether you changed it. The license asks nothing else.

Using a standard on a project works the way you would expect. When you import a SynC standard into a project and tailor it, selecting datasheet options and adding the requirements particular to that job, the specification you produce is your own work, private to that project. Giving it to the owner, the design team, the contractors and suppliers on the project, or a permitting authority is not public distribution. If you do publish it, the credit is all the license asks.

Documents you export from SynC, and the view a recipient reads through a distribution link, carry that credit on their closing page, placed by SynC. You add nothing.

Direct contribution was open under the Contributor License Agreement before SynC took over the writing. The agreement stays published as the record of those terms and takes no new acceptance. A contribution made under it remains under it, with the attribution the agreement provides.

Questions about the standards? Visit the Knowledge Base or contact us. For the binding terms, see the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy.