Process
Five phases, one engineer
Every federation follows the same five phase process. Discover, Derive, Design and Demo, Build, Deploy. The phases are the same whether the build is a focused starting system or a full enterprise federation; the depth of each phase scales with the scope.
01
Discover
Free, written, delivered fast.
Every engagement starts with a written readiness assessment, not a sales call. I look at your existing stack, your data flows, and your stated goals, then tell you plainly what a federation for your organization would take.
The assessment covers where your data actually goes today, what a private federation would change, and what it would take to own instead of rent. Findings are specific to your situation, not a generic checklist.
02
Derive
From the assessment findings I derive a written scope: deliverables, timeline, milestones, and a fixed price for your build. The scope lands in your inbox before any contract. You read it, you ask questions, you sign or you pass. No pressure close.
03
Design and Demo
Before full build I ship a working technical demo that proves the hard pieces, the model, the retrieval, the data connection, work end to end on your own data. This runs early, before the rest of the build is committed, so the risky part is proven first.
04
Build
Full build to the agreed scope. Review checkpoints are scheduled to match the size of the federation, from a single review at the start and the end of a focused build, up to weekly checkpoints on a larger one. This is where most of the engineering happens, on hardware you will own when it is finished.
05
Deploy
Production handover. Verification that the system runs as specified, documentation so your team can operate it, and a follow up review after your federation has been live for a while, where we check it against real usage and adjust anything that needs it.
The same standard I hold my own systems to
This is not a process I invented for client work and skip on my own. MEGAMIND and SEFERIM are documented, tested, and honestly labeled for exactly the same reason a client federation is: so the claims are checkable, not just asserted. The infrastructure that runs my own research is the same infrastructure discipline your build gets.
Begin
Start with the first phase
The readiness assessment is Discover. Tell me what you are protecting and what you want your AI to do.