BoxerConnect publishes an open map of boxing's rules, and free forms for the sport

Boxing is governed by dozens of rulebooks that do not agree, and almost nobody has read them side by side. The result is a sport that looks more fractured than it is, and a grassroots club that reinvents the same paperwork, badly, in every country. Today BoxerConnect, the platform for grassroots amateur boxing, is publishing three things to change that, all free and open.

The first is a plain-English guide to the rules of boxing, amateur and professional, written for parents, new boxers, coaches and fans rather than for lawyers. It explains what the rules actually say, what people get wrong, and where the honest grey areas are.

The second is a convergence map, the first time the major rulebooks have been laid against each other, area by area, to show how much they truly agree. Reading the primary rulebooks of every major body, BoxerConnect mapped 23 core rule areas. In 13 of them the bodies broadly agree already. In another 8 they mostly agree, with minor local variation. Only 2 are genuinely contested, whether elite boxers should wear head guards and how sex eligibility should be decided, and on those two BoxerConnect deliberately refuses to pick a winner, laying out every side and deferring to medical evidence and the governing bodies.

"The story everyone tells is that boxing is chaos, that no two organisations agree on anything," said Jon, founder of BoxerConnect. "That is not what the rulebooks say. When you actually read them, the sport agrees on almost everything that matters and argues about a short, honest list of hard cases. People did not know that, because nobody had done the reading. Now they can see it on one page."

Alongside the map, BoxerConnect has drafted an opt-in baseline ruleset: for each rule area, a sensible default that a new or reforming national federation could adopt instead of starting from a blank page. It is a starting point offered to countries that want one, not a rule aimed at bodies that already have their own, and on the two unsettled safety questions it proposes the safest-leaning option while showing the counter-argument, rather than ruling.

The third, and the one BoxerConnect is proudest of, is Open Forms: a free, standardised library of the 17 forms a grassroots boxing club or a national federation actually needs, from membership and health screening to safeguarding, coach applications and event permits. There are 190 fields in total, each with a stable name so it survives translation, built-in handling for under-18s who need a parent to counter-sign, and a consent-and-signature spine that makes the record valid for insurance and safeguarding. The whole set is published as a machine-readable file and released under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, free to use, share and adapt.

"Every club on earth needs the same registration form and the same safeguarding statement, and almost none of them have a good one," said Jon. "We already built these, and our own clubs use them every day. It costs us nothing to give them to the whole sport, and it might save a federation somewhere a year of committee meetings."

All of it is live now and free. The guides and the open standards are at boxerconnect.com/rules, with the convergence map and the baseline ruleset at /rules/open-standard and the forms at /rules/open-forms.