The senior approver above the editor, and the final publish gate on weekly news and sensitive items. Also the tiebreak when two subject-matter experts disagree about the same assessment.
Governance and people
Who may publish, who may block, and who decides which of them is qualified.
The Council publishes faster than a human editorial team could, because drafts are machine-written. That is only defensible if the judgement stays human and the authority to exercise it is named. Every role below exists to answer one question: when something contestable is published, who signed it.
Council Editorial Lead
Editor
Prepares and reviews drafts, runs the weekly news synthesis, and reviews any survey response flagged as needing human judgement before it counts toward a score.
Subject-matter expert
Holds a strong vote, scoped to one technology category and one participant category. An assessment inside that scope cannot publish without an explicit positive vote, and a negative vote forces a redraft.
Moderator
Decides who is allowed to hold a strong vote. The research agents nominate experts from public sources; a nomination is a proposal, never an appointment. The moderator accepts or rejects each one with the reasoning recorded, and can remove a sitting expert at any time — at which point the work that was waiting on their vote returns to the queue rather than publishing by default.
Analyst
Owns the verification queue: identifying who speaks for a facility or product, chasing the delegation chain, and verifying entries directly when nobody else will.
Administrator
Runs the platform — roles, moderation policy, the research levers, and the weekly internal report on what the audience is reacting to.
The standard for a seat at the table
An expert on the bench can stop a piece of work from publishing, or release it. The person behind the credential therefore matters as much as the credential. A nomination is refused, and a sitting expert removed, on any of these grounds:
- A criminal record.
- Involvement in suspicious activity.
- Reported complaints from a government or regulatory authority.
These are the same reputational tests the Council applies to the companies it assesses. Applying a weaker one to its own bench would make the assessments worth less. Every acceptance, rejection and removal is recorded with the reasoning and the sources behind it.
The advisory board
A board of nine to twelve seats, being recruited now. No seat is filled. Recruitment starts with a small number of senior academic voices, because the rest of a board follows the first few, and the board is announced when there is a board to announce.
Ageing and gerontology
The academic warrant behind the Joyful Living and Healthspan sub-indices. Three to four seats — the largest group, deliberately.
Technology for ageing
Analysts and founders who can say whether a product category is delivering in the field or only in its deck. Two to three seats.
Media and standards
One or two seats advising on editorial standards and reach. A journalist who advises the Council does not also cover it.
Policy and advocacy
One or two seats representing older people's interests rather than the industry's.
Operators
A deliberate minority, walled off from the scoring methodology. Seating an operator executive on a body that rates operators is a conflict, so the preference is for former operators and association leaders.
Conflicts
- Every member discloses their commercial ties, and recuses themselves from any assessment touching their own firm or sector.
- Operators stay a minority of the board and are firewalled from the methodology itself.
- A journalist advising on standards does not simultaneously report on the Council.
No seat is filled yet. The Council names advisors when they have accepted, not while they are being approached. Until this page lists people, it should be read as a statement of how the board will be composed and nothing more.
People
Zoltan Somodi
Agentic Advantage AG — owner and product lead
Responsible for the Council's platform and for the specification behind it.
Mark Messow
Agentic Advantage AG — contributor, moderator, bridge expert
Reviews the Council's published specifications, holds the moderator role that decides who may sit on the expert bench, and serves as the bridge expert across the three launch categories until external experts are appointed.
How work is signed off
Anything that validates a vendor's or operator's claim, judges how widely a product has really been adopted, touches healthspan or joyful living, or says something negative about a named person or company cannot be published without an expert's explicit approval. A negative vote sends it back to be redrafted. Where two experts disagree, the item is held and decided by the Council Editorial Lead.
Weekly news passes an editor and then the Council Editorial Lead before it goes out. Material that publishes automatically is sampled back into an expert audit queue afterwards, and a finding there corrects the published record and retunes what gets routed for review.
Every published item keeps its sources, the route it took, the identity of whoever approved it, and its corrections.
Not medical advice. Experts and opinion leaders publishing through the Council speak for themselves. Any statement about health, therapy or clinical outcome published by the Council is attributed to the named expert who made it, never asserted in the Council’s own voice. Always consult a doctor.