Governance
OMIR is developed in the open by a vendor-neutral Working Group. Veld convenes it and seeds the reference implementation; Veld does not own the standard. Neutrality is not a nicety here — it is the product. A standard wins on neutrality, not features.
This page summarizes the canonical GOVERNANCE.md. Where this summary and that document differ, GOVERNANCE.md governs.
The Working Group
OMIR is stewarded by the OMIR Working Group in a neutral GitHub
organization (OMIR-Working-Group). Membership is open; participation follows the
Code of Conduct
(Contributor Covenant). A Technical Steering Committee (TSC) arbitrates
technical direction and ratifies ballots.
How changes happen: RFC → ballot
- Propose. Open an RFC describing the change — a new resource, a field, a profile, a vocabulary — and the problem it solves. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Discuss. The Working Group reviews in the open. The single most persuasive input is an independent implementer who needs the change.
- Ballot. The TSC calls a ballot. Accepted changes land in a numbered release and enter the maturity model at a low OMM level.
- Earn maturity. A resource or field rises through OMM only as real, independent implementations adopt it. Nothing is graded mature on assertion.
Versioning & deprecation
- Releases are named R1, R2, … Each release is a stable target an implementation can declare conformance to.
- Backwards compatibility. Stabilizing resources (OMM-3+) change only through a published deprecation policy — deprecate, document, then remove in a later release — never silently.
- Honest maturity. The OMM dashboard makes the stability promise per resource explicit, so implementers know what they can depend on.
Licensing
Licensing is deliberately decoupled from any implementation — including Veld's:
- The specification and schemas are CC-BY-4.0.
- The reference code (validator, generators) is Apache-2.0.
A standard under a restrictive license is dead on arrival. The split keeps the spec free to adopt and the tooling free to embed, with neither encumbered by any contributor's commercial terms.