sm-listing

How a community publishes the members who asked to be findable — so an agent that has never met them can discover them by what they offer and where they are.

This is the second hop of agent discovery. sm-federation finds the community; this profile finds the member. They are separate because federation's own §1 says it is not a directory, and a member lookup service is exactly that.

A listing is not a member directory

A directory is the roster: everyone, including people who never asked to be listed anywhere. A listing contains only members who actively opted in, carrying only the fields they chose. Its default state is empty, and a community that enables it with nobody opted in publishes an empty document — which is correct, not a misconfiguration.

That distinction is the whole security model, so the spec states it normatively:

• A non-consenting member is ABSENT — not an opaque entry, not a redacted placeholder. An opaque entry in a list is a census of the non-consenting: it publishes the one fact those members declined to publish, which is that they are there.
• No count of excluded members, or anything one can be derived from. A count computed and then withheld is one refactor away from being emitted; excluding rows so that no count exists by construction is the mechanism.
• The contact route is the member's agent endpoint, never a human contact detail. A consented listing carrying phone numbers is still a harvesting surface — one people opted into without understanding what they opted into.
• No member-authored free text. Every field is a code, an identifier, a URL or a number. Free text is what leaks, and prose does not match across languages, so it was never the discovery mechanism.

What it carries

What it does not promise

Matching is exact and hierarchical-prefix within one scheme. Cross- vocabulary matching is out of scope and stays out: a consumer querying JSIC will not match a publisher who listed only NAICS. Crosswalk tables are lossy, permanently maintained, and produce confidently wrong matches when stale — worse than no match. §6's multi-encoding is the mitigation, and it works by moving the translation burden onto the only participant who cannot get it wrong: the member describing itself.

Layout

Measuring your implementation

pip install "sm-listing[conformance]"
SM_LISTING_ADAPTER=your.module:make_adapter pytest --pyargs sm_listing.conformance

make_adapter returns an implementation of sm_listing.conformance.ListingAdapter. Every run prints the subject it measured. With SM_LISTING_ADAPTER unset the suite fails rather than measuring anything — it does not fall back to the reference implementation, which is what 0.3.0 and earlier did while reporting the result as though it were about your system. Use SM_LISTING_ADAPTER=reference to exercise the suite against the reference on purpose.

MIT.