w3bsAn open institution, built in public.
W3BS is a founding standards initiative for the open Web for humans, agents and devices. It is intended to mature into a vendor-neutral institution. This draft does not claim an incorporated standards body, elected council, existing external membership or affiliation with W3C or IETF.
Founder stewardship can begin the work. Permanent unilateral control cannot be its destination.
Participate
The repository includes public issue templates for proposals, interoperability reports and implementation bugs, plus a pull request template. Until a public repository is published, contributors can prepare proposals using CONTRIBUTING.md; a public submission channel is a launch requirement, not an existing service.
Useful first contributions include trying a reference client, publishing a compatible registry, reproducing conformance results, finding unclear normative language and proposing a different implementation. Participation must not require adopting a founder's commercial product.
Standards lifecycle
| Stage | Evidence required |
|---|---|
| Proposal | A concrete problem, scope, alternatives and an initial technical direction |
| Community Draft | Public discussion with a working implementation and active feedback |
| Candidate Standard | Feature-complete text, open tests and documented implementation results |
| W3BS Recommendation | Stable interoperability demonstrated by multiple independently maintained implementations and a recorded governance decision |
| Revision / Superseded | Versioned evolution, migration guidance and preserved historical identifiers |
No Recommendation has been issued. The reference stack alone cannot satisfy the independent-implementation requirement.
Founding stewardship
The Agentic Era / Profullstack ecosystem may provide initial maintenance and hosting. LogicSRC, OpenSwarm and TronBrowser are potential contributors and reference implementers, not privileged dependencies. Competing protocols and implementations are welcome when they address the same interoperability problem.
Before approving a Recommendation, the initiative must adopt a membership and decision process that includes outside implementers, record its decision quorum and appeal process, and disclose funding and conflicts of interest. These rules remain to be ratified; this document does not invent participants or votes.
Working groups and decisions
Proposed working areas are identifiers and resolution, manifests and portable behaviors, trust and delegation, and device/distributed transport profiles. Each group should publish its charter, scope, editors, participation rules and minutes. Groups listed here are proposed areas, not established committees.
Decisions must identify the question, alternatives considered, evidence, participants, declared conflicts and outcome. The docs/decisions directory is the intended record. No founding meeting or ratification is claimed.
Contributions and intellectual property
Reference code, schemas, examples and specification drafts in this repository are offered under the MIT license. Contributors must have the right to contribute and agree to the same license, using a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off in commits. This does not by itself establish a patent policy or provide a blanket patent clearance.
An explicit standards patent policy and any additional specification contribution terms require public review and ratification before Recommendation status. Do not describe this draft as having completed that process.
Accountability
Maintainers should publish funding sources, affiliations and material conflicts alongside governance decisions. Membership and conformance badges must not be sold as substitutes for passing open tests. Resource signatures establish provenance under a key policy, not certification or endorsement by W3BS.