Ten Years Later

In 2016 I was a public school counselor. I wrote a short post called My School Counselor Vision and Promise. I said the role I wanted did not yet exist. I said I needed powers and scope beyond what a public school counselor was allowed to have. I had no engineering team and no funding. I had a thesis and a promise. Ten years later I am building the thing the promise was always for.

Start the record

What we are

Eformogi is a record of learning the student owns, witnessed by the adults who were there, verifiable at one link with no login, and issued by the schools and counselors who hold the learners.

It is for the kid whose learning does not fit a normal transcript. Homeschool. Alpha-style. PBL. Micro-school. Portrait of a Graduate. Unschool. 2e. Hospital-school. Foster. Refugee. The kid who took a gap year, the kid in a residential program, the kid whose high school closed, the kid whose grades on paper do not tell anyone who they actually are.

We are not an edtech vendor. We are not a form-filling app. We are not a school product. We are a record the family holds, with the receipts to prove what is in it and who has seen it.

What we built

A free record for the family. The transcript, the work samples, the recommendations, the test scores, the consent receipts, the things the kid is proud of. The family owns it. The family keeps it. The family decides who sees it and for how long.

A consent layer that signs every share. When a college or an employer or a scholarship program asks for the record, the family hands them a verified copy with a receipt attached. The receipt has an expiration date. The family can revoke it. The receiver can verify it. Nobody has to take anyone's word for it.

A side for the people in the trenches. School counselors, independent counselors, learning coaches. They upload, they witness, they help the family assemble the record. They never own it. The family does.

Who issues it

A record nobody issues is a diary. So the schools, microschools, and counselors who already hold the learners issue on this one. A school can declare a course row and put its name on it. A counselor can put a caseload on the record in an afternoon. They pay for that, per learner per year, and the family never does.

What they cannot do is own it. The learner holds the keys and the export. If the school stops paying, or the family leaves, or the program closes, the record goes with the learner, including the rows the school declared. I have watched too many kids lose their history in a building change to build it any other way. The terms are written out at /issuers.

Why the protocol is open

The receipt grammar, the witness format, the key model, the transparency log, and the verification rules are published under an open license, with a reference verifier a receiver can run without ever contacting us. You can read the chapters at /spec.

I held that back for a year because product-first is the advice everyone gives, and it was good advice for the product. It was wrong for the record. If a family's record only verifies while my servers are up, the family does not really own it, and I would be asking people to trust a company instead of trusting math. So the format is public, and anyone who wants to implement it against us can.

What we are building

An agent layer for the next ten years. Every family is about to live inside software that acts on their behalf. College match agents. Scholarship agents. Health intake agents. Hiring agents. The question is no longer whether software can act for you. The question is who decides what software is allowed to do on your behalf, and how that permission is recorded, and how it gets revoked when you change your mind.

Eformogi is the answer to that question. The family owns the record. The agent has to ask. The record answers in the family's rules. Every action leaves a receipt.

What we believe

The individual owns their context. Always. No exception. No feature ships that moves a record from a person to an institution. That is the first rule and it is the only one that cannot be negotiated.

We will not become an edtech vendor. We will not sell student data. We will not take capital that requires us to reverse the asymmetry we were started to fix. The family is not for sale, so the family is not the product.

The 2016 post said the service had to be larger than any one person, and that I would always adhere to the ideals so that I always did what was in students' best interests. The ideals have not changed. The surface has. The promise still applies.

If you are a student

The record is yours. The transcript is yours. The work you made is yours. We never charge you for your record. We do not sell what is in it. We do not let anyone look inside without your permission. When you leave for college or a job or a gap year, the record leaves with you.

Start the record.

If you are a parent

You have filled out the same intake form a hundred times for a hundred different institutions. We know. The record holds it once and hands out signed copies with receipts. You stop being the integration layer for your kid's life.

Your record is free for the learner, forever. Capture, witnessing, issuing, verification, export. The one thing a family can choose to pay for is the state paperwork rendered and filed for you (Family Pro, $99 a year, plus one-off letters). Skipping all of it never touches the record. The sovereignty contract spells out exactly what can never cost you anything.

If you are a counselor

You are the trusted adult who sits next to the family while they assemble the record. Signing what you saw is free and always will be. If you want to issue for a whole caseload, that is the issuer side, and it is priced per learner so it never lands on a family. Your practice keeps its own brand. Your families own their own records. We give you the tools. You keep the relationship.

See the counselor view.

The 2016 post

I wrote that to sincerely be a student's advocate, with no conflicting interests, the counselor had to be chosen by and paid for by the student, and accountable directly to the student. I compared myself to a public defender who wanted to be a fancy white shoe law firm. I asked for the powers I felt students deserved: the ability to always be available, the mettle to speak truth back without the pressure to please, the patience of a good doctor.

And I wrote that the right system would give students a verified history of their data and transactions so they would not have to take a leap of faith in the provider every time. The word I used was "blockchain." It was the wrong word. The right word, the one I was reaching for, was sovereignty. A record the student owns, that travels with them, that they can present to anyone and revoke from anyone, that is theirs whether or not I am in the room.

I also said the counselor had to be chosen by and paid for by the student. I have thought about that line a lot. The point I was making was about alignment. Whoever pays decides whose interests get served. In a one-on-one counseling relationship the only way to keep the student's interests first was for the student to be the one paying.

Eformogi is not a counselor. It is a record, and the alignment problem has a different answer. The learner owns it and holds the keys. A school that pays to issue on it is buying the work of issuing, not the record and not the family, and the day it stops paying the learner still walks away with everything. A college that verifies is paying to read what the family chose to show it. The person whose life it is still decides. That is the part I was trying to get right in 2016 and it is the part that stays.

Read the original post.

The promise, restated

If Eformogi works, ten years from now there will be competing implementations, standards bodies, and tools built on top of this that I have not imagined. They will all share one default. The individual owns their context, and the institutions verify against it, instead of the other way around. That is the world I want the students I counseled, and my own kids, to grow up inside.

If any part of this resonates, write to me directly at hello@eformogi.com. The 2016 vision is shipping. There is a lot more to do.

Marcus Siotkas
Founder, Eformogi. September 2026.

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