The U.S. Hawks Board has wrestled with the ratings issue, and we are at a impasse on adopting a system to issue new ratings. We've had great success at issuing ratings based on other existing ratings, but we haven't come up with a system to issue new ratings yet.
We have been at a stumbling block regarding the rating system documents themselves. We generally agree that USHPA's rating system (which evolved over many decades) is a reasonably good standard. Where we have differed is in whether or not we can publish copies of those documents which contain a copyright notice.
I don't want to rehash that argument in this topic (although it might be worth revisiting in a new topic), but I'd like to open the discussion about having U.S. Hawks observers who can give witness to the performance of various flight skills. Those skills need not be from any particular document, but could simply be a reflection as to what was witnessed. There is no copyright violation in referencing another document, and an observer could report witnessing task 'X' as described in USHPA SOP 'Y' without any problem.
We could even extend this approach to actually issuing ratings based on the existing USHPA SOPs, but it seems a little awkward to issue ratings based on documents that we can't publish or distribute ourselves.
Any thoughts are welcome.