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Ownership Transfer

Executive Summary. When a translation method reaches Deployable tier (composite ≥ 0.70) and passes community review, code ownership transfers from the researcher to the Indigenous governance organization. This page documents the five-stage transfer pipeline, OCAP® alignment, and guidance for researchers building methods for Indigenous languages.

When a translation method wins on the Arena leaderboard, what happens to the code? For Indigenous and low-resource languages, the answer is not "the researcher keeps it." The answer is: the community owns it.

How It Works​

The Arena enforces a clear pipeline from research to community ownership:

1. Method Development​

A researcher, student, or developer builds a translation method — an FST-gated pipeline, a coached LLM, a fine-tuned model, or any other approach. They develop it using their own resources.

2. Arena Evaluation​

The method is benchmarked through the eval harness. Every submission is fingerprinted to a specific Git commit and dataset version. Scores are reproducible.

3. Community Review​

For Indigenous language methods, results are reviewed by community language workers and governance organizations. A high leaderboard score proves the method works; it does not prove it is appropriate.

4. Code Transfer​

When a method achieves Deployable tier (composite score ≥ 0.70 against the gold-standard evaluation) and passes community review (human validation):

  • The researcher hands over the source code
  • Legal ownership transfers to the Indigenous governance organization (e.g., a tribal council, language authority, or Métis organization)
  • The governance org holds the encryption keys for evaluation datasets
  • The method becomes a community-controlled asset

See the Scoring Specification, §5 for quality tier definitions and the Benchmark Specification, §8.3 for the full transfer conditions and §7 for the human validation gate.

5. Production Deployment​

The method is exported as an i18n-rosetta plugin and deployed to the production API. The community controls:

  • Who can access the method
  • What pricing terms apply
  • Whether the method can be used commercially
  • When and how the method is updated

Why This Matters​

Traditional ML research follows an extractive pattern:

  1. Researcher collects data from a community
  2. Researcher trains a model
  3. Researcher publishes a paper
  4. Community receives nothing

The Arena inverts this:

  1. Researcher builds a method
  2. Arena validates it
  3. Community receives ownership of the working code
  4. Community earns revenue from API usage

This is not a theoretical framework — it is the operational pipeline for every Indigenous language method on the platform.

OCAP® Alignment​

The ownership transfer process directly implements the OCAP® principles:

PrincipleImplementation
OwnershipThe governance org holds title to the method code and model weights
ControlThe governance org controls deployment terms, access, and pricing
AccessCommunity members access the method through the rosetta API or direct download
PossessionLinguistic resources (coaching data, dictionaries, FST rules) remain on community-controlled infrastructure via the api method

For Researchers​

If you are developing a method for an Indigenous language:

  1. Establish a relationship with the language community before you start
  2. Use openly licensed data for development (not community-restricted resources)
  3. Document provenance in your run card — list every resource, its license, and origin
  4. Be prepared to transfer — if your method succeeds, the code belongs to the community, not to you
  5. This is a feature, not a limitation — your contribution is the architecture and technique, which you can publish and reuse. The community's contribution is the linguistic knowledge that makes it work for their language.

See Also​