Khyenpa

Some things only happen once. Khyenpa is a public register of them. A barrel-aged shoyu from 1934. A steel shelving unit from 1942. An untitled painting of a reservoir. A sourdough starter someone has kept alive since 2013. These have nothing in common except that each is a specific thing rather than a type of thing - this shoyu, this shelf, this starter, not shoyu, shelving and starters in general. That distinction is the whole membership rule. A register is not a catalogue and not a marketplace. It does not sell, value or rank. It records that a particular thing existed, what it was, who made it and when, and then it keeps that record. THE IDENTIFIER Every published entry receives one, and it looks like KH-004219. The letters name the register; the number is issued in order. Three rules govern it, and none has an exception. It is issued once, when an entry is published. A draft you abandon consumes nothing. It is never reissued. If an entry is withdrawn, its number retires with it. It never points at anything else. An entry can be corrected, re-photographed, claimed or disputed, and the identifier still means the object it meant on the day it was issued. WHAT YOU CAN DO Browse 52 divisions covering artwork, architecture, vehicles, instruments, software, living things, recipes, inventions and the rest. Search by name, by maker, or by identifier. Read a record in full: its typed facts, its images, its sources and its credits. Register a thing yourself, with photographs, from inside the app. Claim a thing you made, and be shown on its record as its maker. Follow the people whose records you want to see, and hear when they add something. EVERY RECORD CARRIES ITS SOURCES Seeded entries come from openly licensed public sources, and each one shows its attribution, its licence and a link to where it came from. Facts are free; credit is not optional. WHAT IT IS NOT Nothing is sold and nothing is for sale. There are no advertisements and no third-party tracking. Reading the register needs no account at all. WHO IT IS FOR Makers recording their own work. Collectors recording provenance. Archivists and heritage readers. Anyone who has ever wanted a durable public address for one particular object, and wanted it to still be there in twenty years. Registered once. Kept forever.