Journal — Open source
Three names, one root
In September 2026 StormNet was retired into Digital Sidewalk Lab, and a rule was written so that three uses of one name stop drifting into each other.
A company with one founder and several AI assistants generating documents has a specific failure mode: names drift. A dissertation title ends up on a product page; a lab name falls off a byline; a retired project name reappears in a new proposal because a generator found it in an old one. On September 13, 2026 the Lab wrote the rule that stops this.
The rule
Three names share one root and are not interchangeable.
Digital Sidewalk Lab is the unit and the brand. It is Unit 01 of Pip Projects, Inc. It holds the sensing map and intake, the open-source platform, the research channel, and the author affiliation on every paper.
The Digital Sidewalk is the title of the 2025 dissertation. It is a citation. It is never edited.
Digital Sidewalk, unqualified, is the research framework as named in papers. It is cited as a method and never marketed as a product.
The Lab is on the front of the building. The framework is in the footnotes.
What was retired
StormNet was the working name of the field-test console and its sensor rig from January to September 2026. It is retired as a name. It survives on the existing deployment address and in prior records, which are not rewritten, and it appears in this journal as history. New text, interface labels, and proposals use Digital Sidewalk Lab.
Affiliation
Every paper, preprint, and dataset from the Lab carries one affiliation line: Pip Projects, Inc. · Digital Sidewalk Lab · Independent Researcher. Preprint deposits carry the founder's name as principal investigator with Pip Projects, Inc. as the company. The publications page on this site is the canonical ledger, mirrored at the parent company's site.
Why publish a naming rule
Because a reader who finds this site, the dissertation, and a paper should be able to tell which one they are holding. Governance that lives only in an internal guide protects the company; governance that is published protects the reader.