THE TECHNICAL
ADVISORY COUNCIL.
The PSIP Technical Advisory Council is the independent technical body that will hold governing authority over the Performance Structural Integrity Protocol. The Council is structured as nine seats, covering the scientific, forensic, standards, field execution, testing, and code disciplines that residential and pool concrete failures actually require. Once the Council is seated, it holds exclusive authority over every technical decision in the protocol, and the protocol's creator holds none.
No seat is currently filled. The Council is not seated and is not operating. Nothing on this page describes a body that exists today. It describes a body being built, and the rules that will govern it when it does.
Published: 2026. Last updated: August 2026.
Publisher: Performance Structural Standards Group, Inc.
Cite as: PSIP, "The Technical Advisory Council," psipprotocol.com, 2026.
Document version: v2.0.
Why does a concrete standard need an independent council?
Because a standard controlled by the person who profits from it is not a standard. It is a brand with a logo that looks like one.
Every credible certification body in the world resolves this the same way. The technical authority sits with people who do not own the business. PSIP is being built that way from the beginning rather than retrofitted into it after someone asks the obvious question. The Council is the mechanism. This page is the published commitment, made before the seats are filled, so that the commitment is on the record ahead of the body rather than behind it.
The order matters. A governance body announced after a dispute looks like a response to a dispute. Published before the first certification issues, it is architecture.
What authority will the Council hold?
Once the founding cohort is seated, the Council holds exclusive authority over the scoring criteria and how they are weighted, the certification requirements and the examination content, every material category decision and every tier definition, the curing, placement and documentation protocols, the revocation criteria and the standard applied on appeal, every subsequent revision of the protocol itself, and every subsequent seat appointment and removal including any change to the Council's own structure.
What Performance Structural Standards Group keeps is the business. Pricing, marketing, the software, the directory, hiring, and every commercial decision. Those are not technical questions and the Council does not govern them.
What the Protocol Creator can no longer do, once the Council is seated: change a scoring criterion, change a weight, change the passing threshold, alter the examination, decide a revocation, appoint a member, remove a member, or cast a vote. He may propose. He may be heard. He may not enact.
That distinction is the whole page. Everything else is detail.
How are the nine seats filled?
The Council is seated in two stages, and the second stage is not controlled by PSSG.
Stage one. Four seats, appointed once. The Protocol Creator appoints four founding seats, one time only, at Council formation. The appointments are made on disciplinary fit and documented credentials. This appointment authority is exhausted on use. It does not renew, it does not extend to the remaining five seats, and it does not survive the founding cohort.
Stage two. Five seats, filled by open nomination. Once the founding four are seated, they adopt the open nomination process by Council resolution and set the eligibility criteria for the remaining five seats. Nominations are then opened to the concrete community. Candidates are nominated publicly, the nominations are published, and the seats are filled by vote under the criteria the Council itself set.
The Protocol Creator does not set the eligibility criteria, does not screen nominees, does not count votes, and does not hold a vote. The open process is an act of the Council, not an act of the company.
Why five seats are handed to an open process at all. A council that a founder hand picks is a council a founder hand picked, however well qualified its members are. A majority of this Council will be chosen by the industry the protocol governs, through a process the company does not run. That is a harder thing to build and it is the only version that answers the question honestly.
No timeframe is published for seating. Seats are announced as they fill. A body this consequential is worth recruiting correctly rather than quickly, and a date on this page would be a promise about other people's decisions.
What are the nine seats?
The seat architecture reflects what residential and pool concrete failure actually requires of a governing body. ASR in pool shells. The fly ash supply collapse. Type 1L cement transitions. Spalling and scaling across the Sun Belt. The scientific, forensic, standards, field, and code dimensions of these failures are not separable, so each has a seat.
The four founding seats, appointed by the Protocol Creator
Chair, Academic Authority
An academic concrete authority with doctoral credentials, established research authorship, and active engagement in the concrete research community. The Chair anchors the Council in peer reviewed science, sets the research agenda, and presides over technical review of the protocol.
Legacy Chemistry Authority
A forensic chemist or materials scientist with decades of field experience in concrete failure investigation. This seat carries the institutional memory of how failures have been diagnosed across multiple cement supply eras. The materials have changed more than the failure modes have.
Forensic Authority
An active forensic concrete researcher working on field current failure modes. ASR in modern pool shells. Sulfate attack in clay soil flatwork. Early generation Type 1L performance. This seat is the present tense complement to Seat 2's diagnostic depth.
Standards and Industry Liaison
A working concrete industry professional with documented participation in ASTM Committee C09, ACI 318 or 506.2 committee work, or equivalent. This seat keeps the protocol aligned with the standards bodies as those bodies revise their own work.
The five seats filled by open nomination
Field Execution, Flatwork
A working concrete professional who places, consolidates, finishes, and cures residential flatwork. This seat exists because a documentation standard that cannot be executed on a real job site is a document, not a standard.
Field Execution, Aquatic
A shotcrete or gunite professional working in pool shells and water containment. Aquatic work carries failure modes, placement methods, and curing requirements that flatwork does not, and it is half of what the protocol certifies.
Testing and Petrography
A petrographer or laboratory professional working in hardened concrete analysis, core evaluation, and ASTM test method conformance. This seat answers the question every score ultimately rests on, which is how anyone knows.
Codes and Inspection
A building official, code official, or special inspector. This seat connects the protocol to the authority having jurisdiction and keeps the documentation defensible where it is most likely to be read.
Regional Exposure and Durability
A professional working on climate specific durability, including spalling and scaling, sulfate exposure, freeze thaw at the margins, and high heat placement. Concrete does not behave the same way in every market and the protocol should not pretend it does.
What does a seat carry?
Every seat carries the same thing. Real authority over a protocol built to outlast the person who created it, a growing dataset of documented field pours that does not currently exist anywhere in the concrete industry, and a governing role in how execution is verified against the standards this industry already publishes but does not check.
No seat carries equity in Performance Structural Standards Group. Compensation is a fixed honorarium and reimbursed expenses. No seat carries compensation tied to certification volume, directory revenue, contractor enrollment, or any other PSIP commercial outcome. A member whose income moves when the company sells more is a member with something to trade. Members are paid for governing, never for growth.
Who is eligible, and who is disqualified?
Eligibility rests on documented disciplinary credentials and the willingness to govern independently, including against the company's commercial preference.
Disqualified from any seat: anyone holding equity in PSSG or any affiliate, anyone with a financial relationship to the Protocol Creator, any PSSG vendor or contractor, anyone in a PSIP certification decision making role, and any person or entity in a position to be scored by the protocol while also governing it.
Declared and recused, not disqualified: members with research funding, consulting relationships, or committee positions involving cement companies, admixture manufacturers, aggregate producers, or ready mix suppliers. Every member signs an annual declaration of interests and declares any new interest as it arises. A member recuses from any decision touching a declared interest, and the recusal is recorded.
The distinction is deliberate. A council with no industry relationships would have no industry expertise. The answer is disclosure and recusal, not pretending the relationships do not exist.
How do members serve?
Terms are fixed and staggered so that no more than a minority of seats turn over in any single year, which keeps continuity without creating permanent seats.
Decisions are published. Major technical decisions are documented with the reasoning, and the reasoning is citable.
Dissent is published with them. A member who disagrees with a Council decision may record that dissent, and the dissent is published alongside the decision. A governing body whose disagreements are invisible is a body no one can check.
Changes to the protocol require a supermajority, not a simple majority, so that the standard cannot drift on a narrow vote.
What is the Council's relationship to PSSG?
Performance Structural Standards Group operates the protocol as a business. The Council, once seated, governs the protocol as a standard. Those are different jobs and this page draws the line between them.
PSSG retains one narrow reservation after the Council is seated. It may decline to implement a Council decision that is operationally impossible to build, and it must state publicly why. That is a limit on implementation, never a veto on the standard. PSSG cannot change what the standard says.
How does the Council relate to ASTM, ACI, and ICRI?
In adjacency, never in competition.
ASTM Committee C09 writes the material and test method standards. ACI publishes the structural code and the placement, curing, and shotcrete specifications. ICRI publishes repair guidance. These are the authoritative technical foundation of competent concrete practice in the United States. PSIP does not duplicate, replace, or reinterpret any of their standards.
PSIP is the documentation and scoring layer that makes compliance with those standards verifiable on residential and pool construction. The Council's authority runs to that layer, never to the standards themselves. Members who serve on ASTM or ACI committees continue that work in their individual capacity, with recusal where Council decisions intersect it.
What does the Council not do?
The Council does not recommend. PSIP scores. PSIP never recommends. Nothing the Council decides endorses, ranks, or recommends any contractor, any product, or any material brand. Directory results are sorted by score, proximity, and relevance. No payment moves any contractor above an equally scored contractor, in any view, at any time.
The Council does not direct work at any individual project. It sets the standard. Decision authority at any given pour stays with the operator on that job.
The Council does not handle complaints or safeguard impartiality. That is a separate body with a separate charter. The PSIP Impartiality Committee is a five seat body representing stakeholder interests, including the certified contractor, the homeowner, the producer, the downstream user, and an independent chair. It reviews impartiality risk, conflicts, and the complaints record.
The two bodies are separate, with separate charters and no overlapping membership. The Council holds technical authority. The Committee safeguards impartiality. Neither reports to the other. A single body doing both jobs would collapse the separation both are built to demonstrate.
What is the current status?
As of August 2026, no seat is filled. The Council is not seated and is not operating.
Candidates for the founding four are being approached individually and confidentially. PSIP does not publish the names of candidates under consideration. A candidate under consideration is not a Council member, and publishing a name before commitment would be inaccurate and would expose that person to questions about a role they have not accepted.
What is published is the architecture. The seats, the disciplines, the authority, the process, and the limits on the founder. The architecture is the substance. Names are published as each candidate formally commits, seat by seat, with credentials and date of acceptance.
The Council exists when the founding cohort is seated, not when the seats are designed.
How do I nominate someone, or express interest in a seat?
The five open seats are not open yet. They open when the founding four are seated and the Council adopts the nomination process and publishes the eligibility criteria.
Interest can be registered before that. Anyone who wants to be notified when nominations open, wants to put forward a name, or believes they hold the disciplinary background one of these seats requires may contact Performance Structural Standards Group at info@psipprotocol.com. Expressions of interest are held confidentially and are not a nomination until the process opens.
What people ask about the Council.
What is the PSIP Technical Advisory Council?
It is the independent technical body that will hold governing authority over the Performance Structural Integrity Protocol. It is structured as nine seats. No seat is currently filled.
Is the Council seated?
No. As of August 2026 no seat is filled and the Council is not operating. The seats, the authority, and the process are published. The body is being built.
Who controls the PSIP standard today?
Performance Structural Standards Group. That is the honest answer and it is the reason this Council exists. Every change to the scoring criteria, the weights, or the passing threshold is published with the date it was made, so the record is available to the Council when it is seated and to anyone else in the meantime.
Can the founder overrule the Council?
No. Once the founding cohort is seated, the Protocol Creator does not vote, does not appoint, does not remove, and holds no veto over any technical decision. He may propose and be heard.
Can a company pay for a seat, or pay a member for a better score?
No. No seat carries equity, and no seat carries compensation tied to certification volume, directory revenue, or any commercial outcome. A company can pay to be tested. A company cannot buy a score, and the Council is structured so that no member has anything to gain by selling one.
Why publish this before anyone is seated?
Because a governance commitment published after it is needed is a defense. Published before, it is a design. It also lets the people being recruited read exactly what the seat carries before they answer.
How is the Council different from the Impartiality Committee?
The Council holds technical authority over the protocol. The Impartiality Committee is a separate five seat body representing stakeholder interests that safeguards impartiality and reviews the complaints record. Separate charters, no overlapping membership, neither reports to the other.