Open Request Protocol (ORP)

An open, federated protocol for recipient-sovereign requests, a structured todo layer that rides on email today and graduates to native federated transport.

Thesis

Email treats every message equally and leaves triage to the recipient. ORP inverts this:

1. Recipient policy — machine-readable rules for what may land on your list
2. Declared Request — sender states intent, importance, deadline, and payload
3. Anti-inflation — per-relationship budgets, reputation, optional stake

One Request object, two transports:

• Native — federated server-to-server delivery (full policy enforcement)
• Email bridge — degrades to SMTP for non-users; embeds structured data for upgrade path

Quick start

# Build
cargo build --release

# Run a home server (requires Postgres)
orp serve --database-url postgres://localhost/orp

# Send a request
orp send --to bob@example.com --intent reply --summary "Review the deck" --importance normal

# Validate a policy
orp validate-policy spec/examples/policy.json

Go client

go get github.com/openrequestprotocol/orp/bindings/go@v0.2.0

import "github.com/openrequestprotocol/orp/bindings/go/orp"

client := orp.NewClient("http://localhost:8787", orp.WithSharedSecret("secret"))
kp, _ := orp.GenerateKeyPair("my-key")
signed, _ := kp.SignRequest(&unsigned)
receipt, _ := client.Deliver(ctx, signed)

Repository layout

Path	Purpose
spec/	JSON Schemas, human-readable spec
crates/orp-core	Types, signing, policy enforcement (WASM-ready)
crates/orp-server	Federated home server reference implementation
crates/orp-bridge	Email ↔ Request conversion
crates/orp-cli	CLI: serve, send, validate
bindings/wasm	JavaScript/WASM bindings
bindings/go	Go client (github.com/openrequestprotocol/orp/bindings/go)
conformance/	Test vectors for third-party implementations

Discovery

Recipients publish at https://<domain>/.well-known/orp:

{
  "v": "0.1",
  "endpoint": "https://orp.example.com",
  "public_keys": [{ "key_id": "key1", "alg": "ed25519", "value": "..." }],
  "policy_url": "https://orp.example.com/v1/policy/bob@example.com"
}

License

Dual-licensed under Apache-2.0 OR MIT.