Governance, process, and how to participate
OpenChronology is an open standard, not a product. No single company owns it. The Working Group exists to ensure the spec evolves deliberately — with backward compatibility, clear versioning, and genuine community input. When this page is complete, it will cover:
- Working Group members — who currently stewards the standard, their roles, and how new members are nominated.
- The proposal process — how to submit a change request or new feature proposal, the review stages, and what makes a proposal likely to be accepted.
- The versioning policy — how MINOR and MAJOR version bumps are decided, the backward-compatibility commitment, and how migration guides are published.
- Meeting notes and decisions — a public record of significant discussions and the reasoning behind spec decisions.
- Roadmap — planned features and open questions for future spec versions.
The standard is built in the open
All spec work happens publicly on GitHub. You don’t need to wait for formal governance to participate — open an issue, start a discussion, or submit a pull request against the working repository.
- Open an issue — report an ambiguity in the spec, propose a new field, or flag a compatibility concern.
- Start a discussion — broader questions about direction, use cases, or ecosystem fit.
- Read the spec — the current normative definition of everything in the standard.
- Build an implementation — the fastest way to shape a standard is to implement it and report what breaks.
OpenChronology is anchored by the 1000 Year Project but designed for universal use — history, fiction, science, project management, or any domain that needs structured, portable chronological data. The Working Group welcomes participants from all of these communities.