HyperAlliant · Maryland Benefit Company
Vendor-neutral technology education, for the public good.
HyperAlliant is a Maryland public benefit company: a trusted, non-partisan source of technology research, curriculum development, and training — independent of any vendor's product roadmap.
Our flagship programme, SD-Agile, is the methodology and certification track we researched, wrote, and now teach — free online through the SD-Agile Project, and live to organisations who bring us in.
Free for government and nonprofit employees, veterans and military spouses, and — through our nonprofit, school, and agency partners — people facing unemployment, underemployment, or homelessness, justice-involved individuals, foster youth, people with disabilities, and Title I students.
Our charter
Vendor-neutral, from research to classroom.
We're not a training vendor reselling somebody else's product. Everything we teach, we researched and wrote ourselves.
Research & Development
We study how enterprise software actually fails — not how a vendor's marketing says it fails — and publish the methodology and the evidence, independent of any product or platform.
Curriculum & Course Development
We turn that research into courses, certification paths, and reference material other organisations can teach from, not just consume.
Training & Education
We deliver it two ways: free and self-paced through the SD-Agile Project, or live and bespoke through HyperAlliant, for organisations that want it brought to their team.
Two ways to learn
Two doors. Same methodology.
One is free and self-paced. The other comes to your organisation and is built around what your teams actually do. Most people start with the first.
The SD-Agile Project · Nonprofit
Free, self-paced, online
The SD-Agile Project is the nonprofit side of what we do. It exists to put this training in front of people who are never going to get a budget line for it.
- 15 courses, six languages, your own pace
- Free for full-time government and nonprofit employees
- Tuition waivers if you're out of work or underemployed
HyperAlliant · Paid
Live training, built for your organisation
We plan and schedule a programme around what your agency or company actually needs, instead of handing you a fixed catalogue and asking you to squeeze into it.
- Two-hour seminars through multi-week certification programmes
- In person, or as synchronous online classes
- Delivered in any of the six languages
Public benefit
Two paths in, depending on your situation.
This is the part of the charter that actually costs us something, which is how you know we mean it.
Apply directly
Full-time employees of government agencies and nonprofits, and veterans and military spouses, take our online courses free. You apply when you register — no purchase order, no procurement cycle, no waiting on somebody's budget.
Through a partner organisation
People facing unemployment, underemployment, or homelessness, justice-involved individuals, foster youth, people with disabilities, and Title I students access training through the nonprofits, agencies, and schools that already serve them.
Certification
Six credentials, in order.
You start at Foundation. Each rung assumes the one below it. The last two aren't coursework — they're evidence.
- 01SD-Agile Foundation
The vocabulary and the argument. Where everybody starts. - 02Certified Specification Author
Write specifications a machine can build from without guessing. - 03Certified Alignment Authority
Own the integrity of a Build Package and adjudicate what's ambiguous. - 04Certified Org Admin
Run the platform for an organisation and curate its library. - 05Enterprise Practitioner — Level 1
The coursework plus a documented real-world implementation. - 06Enterprise Practitioner — Level 2
A body of work, attested by an already-certified practitioner.
The platform
Software that makes the discipline enforceable.
You can practise SD-Agile with a text editor and a lot of willpower. The platform is for when willpower stops scaling.
Spec Studio Available now
Where intent gets encoded before any code is generated: Elicit, Review & Instruct, and Library. Available as SaaS, on the Azure Marketplace, or as a cloud-neutral download you run yourself.
Learn more →Learning Platform Available now
How training gets delivered at scale — cohorts, progress tracking, credential attestation, six languages. Same three delivery options.
Learn more →App Builder & Deployment Beta
Turn an approved specification into running, deployed software. Free for beta customers now; general availability planned for Q4 2026.
Learn more →Compliance Corridor Beta
Compliance as hard walls before generation, not a review after it. Free for beta customers now; general availability planned for Q4 2026.
Learn more →Six languages
Built multilingual. Not translated later.
US English, Commonwealth English, Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, and Canadian French — in the training and in the platform.
Most training gets built in English and translated when somebody complains. It shows. The diagrams stay in English, the examples stay American, and a good chunk of the meaning falls out in transit. We author every course as content plus a string table from the first slide, so adding a language is a rebuild rather than a rewrite. Your team in Montréal gets the same course as your team in Maryland, down to the labels inside the diagrams.
Why this exists
AI doesn't remove ambiguity. It industrialises it.
Every requirement you didn't write down is a decision somebody has to make anyway. When a human made it, you got one guess a day. Now you get thousands an hour.
That distance between what you said and what the machine had to assume is the Inference Gap, and it is where enterprise software actually goes wrong — not in the code, in what nobody wrote down. Every other engineering profession builds from signed specifications before production starts. Software is the only one that normalised building from narrative fragments and hoping it works out. That was survivable when humans were the bottleneck. It is not survivable now.
Our other work
Two other things, and that's it.
We are a small company. We teach, we license the platform, and we sponsor open source. There is no fourth thing.
Platform licensing
For organisations that want to run the platform themselves — as SaaS, from the Azure Marketplace, or cloud-neutral on their own infrastructure. Licensing revenue is part of what pays for the free training.
Learn more →Sponsored open source
The SD-Agile Project builds free and open-source software with the platform and gives it away. A growing collection — currently an integrated worker experience platform and an integrated enhancement and bug capture system.
Learn more →Why a benefit company
The maths only works one way.
How can the courses be free? Because somebody else is paying for them.
HyperAlliant is a Maryland public benefit company. The paid work — live training for organisations that can afford it, and platform licensing — funds the free online training and the open-source software. That is the entire model. No venture capital, no outside investors, and nobody upstairs asking why we give away the thing other people charge for. Government contractors and commercial organisations pay. People who serve the public don't.
Start
Pick a door.
Creating an account takes about two minutes. Browsing the catalogue doesn't even require that.