Somebody asked, entirely reasonably, what the levels are.
It is one of the first questions any framework of this shape gets, and the answer is that there are none. Not yet, not later, and not quietly held back as a thing to introduce once there are enough people to sort.
The question deserves better than a flat no, though, because almost everything organised around knowledge does have levels, and they are not there by accident.
Why the ladder is tempting
Grades solve real problems, and they solve them well.
They tell a newcomer what to do next, which is the single most useful thing a structure can do for someone who has just arrived and does not know where to stand. They make progress visible in a way that private study never is. They give the people running the thing a reason for members to stay, and something to hand over at the end of a year.
Martial arts have belts. Universities have degrees. Professional bodies have letters after the name, and those letters do genuine work: they tell you the bridge was signed off by somebody who can be struck off.
So the objection here is not that hierarchies of attainment are silly. Some of them are load-bearing and the world is better for them.
The objection is narrower, and it is about what a level would be measuring in this particular case.
What a rank would have to claim
A professional qualification measures a defined competence against a published standard. It is falsifiable. Somebody can be assessed, and somebody else can check the assessment.
A rank inside a body organised around broad, self-directed curiosity cannot do that, because there is no defined competence and there is no standard. Wide reading across unrelated fields has no syllabus by definition — the moment it has one, it is a syllabus, and the thing that made it interesting has been quietly removed.
So a level here would not be measuring knowledge. It would be measuring how long somebody had been around, how much they had paid, or how much the person awarding it liked them.
All three are real things. None of them is what the framework says it is about.
The specific failure
Here is the part that actually worries me.
The third principle is admit ignorance. The fourth is share knowledge. Both of them are easy to agree with and moderately difficult to practise, and a rank makes both of them harder.
A person with a grade to protect has an incentive not to say “I don’t know” in front of somebody with a lower one. A person hoping for the next grade has an incentive to perform certainty rather than admit the gap. And knowledge that confers status is knowledge you have a reason to meter out rather than hand over.
Put a ladder in a room full of clever people and a quantity of the energy that was going into the subject starts going into the ladder instead. Not all of it. But some, and reliably.
A framework that produced that outcome would have inverted two of its own seven principles inside a year, and would deserve to be dismantled.
The domains are not a ladder either
The ten domains of practice invite the same misreading, so it is worth saying plainly: they are not a set to be collected, and holding nine of them is not a score.
They are a map for describing where you have spent your attention. Somebody with one domain and a good open question is further along than somebody with ten and no practice, and nothing about the arrangement is meant to suggest otherwise.
But there are two memberships
There are, and it would be evasive not to address it.
Observer and Member are a funding relationship, not a rank. A Member is somebody who has decided to help pay for rooms, hosting and the administration that would otherwise become one person’s unpaid second job, and who wants a say in how the language and the principles develop while they are still soft enough to change. That is all it is. It buys influence over the project, deliberately, and it does not buy standing as a practitioner.
Nobody is a better wizard for having paid. The Observer tier is free, permanent and not a trial.
Founding Member of the first cohort is the one thing that looks most like a rank, and it is not one either. It is a date. It records when somebody turned up, which is a fact about the calendar rather than about them.
What replaces it
Nothing replaces it, and that is the honest answer rather than a clever one.
There is no initiation, no assessment, no progression and no point at which anybody is finished. What there is instead is the practice — learn outside your field, make something, mend something, teach somebody, check a claim, keep the notebook — and the practice does not get easier or confer anything as it goes.
If a person needs a shape for that, this is the shape:
There is nothing to ascend through. There is more to learn.
That is less satisfying than a belt. It is also the only version of this that survives contact with the seventh principle, because a thing you have finished is a thing you have stopped wondering at.
And if that sounds like an excuse for having built no structure yet, it is worth noticing that structure is easy and would take an afternoon. Declining to build it is the harder decision, and the one more likely to be regretted in a few years by somebody who wanted a certificate.
I would rather be wrong in that direction.