Briefs

Structured orientation documents supporting active standards and registry programs, with explicit scope and non-goals.

Orientation Memov1.0.16 min read

Why Sports Rights Need Neutral Infrastructure

Foundational orientation memo

A short orientation memo explaining why recurring sports rights failures are structural rather than contractual, and why neutral representation infrastructure is a necessary precondition for coordination. This memo provides context for the USG protocol stack and related work.

Pilot Briefv1.012 min read

The Universal Sports Graph — Pilot Brief

A single-season, league-platform pilot for the Universal Sports Graph.

An 8-page implementation brief translating the USG whitepaper and RFC 0001 into a real-world pilot: rights schema v0.1, Access API stub, clearinghouse sandbox, governance structure, KPIs, and next steps for running a 2026 single-season, $4.99 day-pass pilot between a league and a streaming platform.

• Supplement to DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17537287
Design Briefv1.08 min read

Public Spec #1: Surface "Surprise Me" at the System Level on Xbox

A system-level design brief for content discovery on Xbox

A public design brief examining how elevating Xbox's existing "Surprise Me" feature to the system level could reduce choice fatigue, improve engagement, and surface latent value across the Xbox ecosystem. The brief treats interface affordances as system primitives rather than isolated UI features.

The Approach

Scott Jellen is an independent researcher focused on protocol design, rights modeling, and interoperability across digital and public systems. His flagship work, the Universal Sports Graph (USG), defines a neutral infrastructure layer for representing sports rights through published RFCs and a versioned reference registry. Additional briefs and whitepapers explore how incentive clarity and structural design shape scalable institutions.

© 2026 Scott Jellen. Licensing varies by publication.