How OWHS is governed
Status: early open specification.
OWHS was created by Zak Fenton and is currently stewarded by Alltoogether. Its specification, schemas and supporting materials are published under permissive licences and are open to inspect, use, challenge and improve. If OWHS earns independent use and recurring contribution, its governance will move to a multi-stakeholder structure so that no single commercial organisation controls its future.
The conflict of interest, stated plainly
Alltoogether develops commercial products that may implement OWHS. The standard does not require use of any Alltoogether product, and the project publishes its contribution, decision and change processes openly.
A standard graded and stewarded by a company with products in the same field carries a real conflict, and no wording removes it. What manages it is process, in public: every change to the specification or the registry goes through a visible pull request; every decision is logged with its reasons; and when evidence points against an instrument the steward's products use, the change follows the same public process as any other, and the monthly sweep report says so plainly.
What governance means here, concretely
- A public decision log. Every material decision, with options considered and reasons, dated, running since before release.
- A public changelog. Every version of the specification and the registry, with what changed. See the changelog.
- An open change process. Anyone can raise an issue or respond to an RFC. Substantive contributions are reviewed in the next published maintenance cycle. Contributions are asked to declare any financial or professional interest in instruments they reference. The contribute page sets out the routes and the asks.
- Grades are single-rater until independent raters join. Evidence grades in the instrument registry are the work of a single rater, an Alltoogether employee, applying a published rubric. Grades and statuses are frozen from first publication and stay frozen until two named psychometric raters who are not Alltoogether employees have joined the process. Citation evidence continues to accrue in the meantime, with affected cells flagged for review. This is stated on the methods page and on every registry page, because it is the honest current limit of the registry.
- Corrections first. The project sets itself no response-time promises except one: corrections of factual errors take priority over all other work. The registry publishes a public corrections process.
- A right of reply. The steward of any instrument the registry grades may file a response; it is recorded and linked beside the record. It does not override the evidence, and it is never edited.
When governance changes
The move to multi-stakeholder governance is gated on evidence, not on ceremony. The indicative triggers: two or more independent organisations mapping to or implementing OWHS; a small number of recurring external contributors; at least one independent technical, privacy or domain reviewer involved in high-impact change control; or a material decision the current steward cannot credibly make alone. Until those exist, forming a governance body would mean a committee without a community, so there is none yet. When they exist, governance moves so that no single commercial organisation, including the founding one, controls the project's future.
What this site collects
The site sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. Page views are counted by PostHog (EU servers) using a daily-rotating hash, with IP addresses discarded on arrival, so that we can see which pages are read. No individual is identified. Nothing collected here is used for marketing, passed to the steward's commercial products, or shared with anyone.
Continuity, and the check on the steward
The licences are permissive and irrevocable. The entire corpus, specification, schemas, codelists, registry and history, can be taken and continued by anyone at any time. If stewardship fails, through neglect or through bad judgement, the remedy is not a complaint procedure: it is a fork. That possibility is deliberate. It is the standing check on the steward.
If the project enters a quiet period, it will say so: a declared maintenance-only mode in which automated evidence sweeps continue, corrections are handled, and new work pauses. Quiet is a mode, not an ending.