Governance and Revision¶
Revision process¶
Whenever standards are revised there needs to be a governance process.
This is likely to make use of an issue tracker and a changelog.
Worked example: OCDS¶
The governance process for the Open Contracting Data Standard is set out in the diagram below.
Governance process
As the OCDS ChangeLog illustrates, each change has a related GitHub issue where changes are discussed.
During the revision process, discussions took place in a range of fora, including through the mailing list, at face-to-face events, or through webinars. However, substantive points should always be written up as part of the GitHub issues to ensure changes are documented and justified.
A peer-review stage in OCDS revision provided an opportunity for formal feedback on changes, and was facilitated through the creation of a spreadsheet template that experts could work through.
Conformance and deprecation policies¶
A standard needs policies on:
- Conformance
- Deprecation
For example, see the OCDS conformance and deprecation policies