Make the invisible work visible.

Every open-source project runs on work that never shows up in commit history. The review that caught a subtle bug. The doc rewrite that unblocked a new contributor. The triage that kept the issue tracker readable. Extol is where that work becomes a record, signed by the people who saw it.

What Extol does

Contribution beyond git blame.

Code review, docs, triage, mentorship, release coordination. The work maintainers and contributors already do, recorded and credited by the peers who were there.

Portable, even when someone else profits.

Whether a company ships your library or a model trains on your contributions, your record is yours. Signed by real people, verifiable by anyone, doesn't disappear when a platform changes hands.

A protocol, not a platform.

Extol emits attestations against a published specification: the Attestation Notary Specification. Anyone can verify them. Anyone can implement them. Your record survives whichever tool captured it. Spec at github.com/extol-work/notary.

What Extol is not

Not a leaderboard. No stars, no rank, no gamified contribution score.

Not a substitute for git. Commit history stays where it is. Extol records everything around it.

Not a token. Signatures are cryptographic, but there's no coin to earn and nothing to trade.

For the developer audience

Extol is the first production adopter of the Attestation Notary Specification — the specification we authored for signed factual claims and their notarization to a public substrate. Anyone can implement it, and anyone can verify attestations without any Extol account. That's the point. Spec at github.com/extol-work/notary.