Publisher: GitCover Commons gUG

GitCover Commons gUG (GCC) is the publisher of the GitCover Body of Knowledge (GCBoK) — the normative reference work for Git-native compliance.

What is the GCBoK?

The GCBoK is comparable to PMBOK (Project Management), SWEBOK (Software Engineering), and DMBOK (Data Management) — but with its own conceptual framework: Git-native, OSS-first, non-profit-backed. It canonizes terms, concepts, and architecture principles for compliance solutions that primarily live in Git repositories.

Distinction: GCC vs. GCBoK

Characteristic	GCC (this site)	GCBoK (gcbok.org)
What	NPO/Organization	Knowledge and reference work
Content	Statutes, donations, activities, projects	Terms, concepts, specifications
Purpose	Promotion of the common good	Normative terminological authority
URL	gitcover.org	gcbok.org

Recent EU legislation requires documented, auditable evidence. The GCBoK clarifies what Git-native compliance provides and what it does not: It provides evidence as Git artifacts (origin, history, approvals, incidents, portability), but does not certify AI systems, does not mark products with CE, and does not replace trust services. The legal conformity of the deployed system remains with the operator.

The Diary as the Gateway to Compliance

The GitCover Diary is the agenda of actual work. It documents not only hours, but connects activities, decisions, projects, service periods, spheres, evidence, and contracts. This temporal SSoT provides BSFZ/FZul, Finanzamt/EStG/EÜR, VAT, GoBD/AO, deadline and risk evidence with a shared, versioned starting point.

The process is deliberately simple: Diary keeps the agenda, tenant repositories keep the proof. The Diary does not replace external evidence; it ensures that the evidence does not have to be reconstructed from memory later. Git, open schemas, sidecars, and GCPN make the chain portable — a company does not have to hand over its compliance to an accounting, cloud, or AI provider. This is precisely where the practical benefit of GitCover lies: risk becomes visible early, evidence becomes reproducible, and vendor lock-in is avoided.

The canonical clarification and distinction is provided by the GCBoK in Axis 1: Foundations — Legal Framework (section "EU Regulation / Distinction: Evidence Infrastructure vs. Product Conformity").

Distinction - what the shared inventory comprises: Diary, tenant repositories, and a company's Git inventory contain exclusively compliance-relevant artifacts: evidence, decisions, proofs, tools. Personal specifications of the approving person - private assessments, opinions, weightings - are protected private information: They are kept locally, not versioned, and not incorporated into Diary, tenant repos, or evidence. What is documented is what resulted from them: the decision, the template, the weight - not the assessment behind it.

The canonical explanation is in the GCBoK, section "Distinction: Compliance Inventory and Private Specifications", in Axis 5 under "Private Specifications of the HITL — Convention and Agent Rule" and in Axis 7 under "From Private Opinion to Verifiable Result".

Relation to Non-Profit Status

Maintaining an ISO/IEC 24773-conformant standard is a scientific-structural task that demonstrates the GCC's non-profit status:

§ 52 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 AO (Science and Research) — GCBoK as a scientific reference work
§ 52 Abs. 2 Nr. 7 AO (Vocational Education) — GCBoK as a teaching and structural work
ISO/IEC 24773 — BoK structure as the basis for certification schemes

Open Source and Community

The GCBoK follows OSS principles: specifications under CC BY-SA 4.0 (intended), code components under Apache 2.0. Contributions via Gitea pull requests. Sources primarily at git.gitcover.org, mirrored on Codeberg and GitHub as community anchors.

On the GCBoK reference work: gcbok.org — terms, concepts, architecture principles, specifications.