Bobbie-Jane Skewes spent her career in luxury hospitality and destination development — industries where a brand's reputation is its most operationally fragile asset, and where the gap between what an organisation promises and what it delivers is measured in relationship terms, not just commercial ones. That background shaped a particular instinct: governance is not paperwork, it is the condition under which trust can be maintained at scale. When she moved into the AI space, taking on a commercial strategy role at a digital avatar platform, she carried that instinct with her. What she found was a technology that could place a named person's face, voice, and communicative presence into hundreds of interactions simultaneously — and almost no coherent framework for governing what that meant in practice.
Bradley Gaylard came to the same problem from a different direction. For over thirteen years at Firefly Education, he led the creative and publishing functions behind a portfolio of award-winning curriculum products — working at the intersection of instructional design, editorial rigour, and digital production. That work demands a particular kind of thinking: what must a learner be able to demonstrate, under what conditions, and what does failure to demonstrate it actually mean?
Together, working with digital avatar deployments and encountering the same unanswered questions repeatedly, they concluded that the gap was structural. Organisations deploying DRRPs had no coherent standard to verify that consent, authority, identity, or accountability could be traced.
DPIF was built to fill that gap.
The Digital Presence Integrity Framework draws directly on the discipline of curriculum instrument design. A well-constructed curriculum instrument does not reward intent or effort — it specifies what must be demonstrably in place, and it fails assessments that cannot provide evidence. That logic is not punitive; it is the only logic that makes a standard credible. Organisations claiming conformance with DPIF must evidence their controls. Assertions, roadmaps, and vendor assurances are not accepted. Where evidence cannot be provided, the control is unmet.
The framework is non-compensatory by design. A deployment cannot achieve certification through strength in five areas while a sixth remains uncontrolled. This reflects a foundational judgment: identity, consent, authority, and accountability are not a spectrum.
A person's digital representation is either governed or it is not.
The Presence Authority is the body that maintains DPIF. It exists to keep the framework independent, evidence-based, and practically applicable as the technology and its deployment contexts evolve.
We are not anti-AI. We are not anti-automation. DPIF does not evaluate whether AI-mediated representation should be used — it defines the controls required when it is. Organisations that deploy DRRPs are doing something that carries inherent responsibility, and that responsibility requires a governance structure commensurate with the risk.
DPIF is that structure.
Announcement coming soon.
All DPIF instruments are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence. Organisations, regulators, and developers may adopt, adapt, and redistribute DPIF materials provided attribution is maintained and derivative works are shared under the same terms.