Open Standards Proposals

This repository contains proposals for open standards that aim to improve technical communication and documentation practices.

Current Proposals

1. OSSS — Open Specification Structure Standard

Status: Proposal (v0.1)
Location: OSSS/osss-proposal.md

OSSS is a minimal, opinionated, governance-agnostic document structure for technical specifications and proposals. It eliminates the structural design phase that every standards project faces by providing a sensible default structure — similar to how Semantic Versioning standardizes version numbers or Conventional Commits standardizes commit messages.

Key Features:

• Anti-bikeshedding tool for standards projects
• 9 required sections that encode decades of wisdom from Rust RFCs, PEPs, KEPs, and IETF RFCs
• Governance-agnostic (works with any decision-making process)
• Markup-agnostic (can be implemented in Markdown, reStructuredText, etc.)
• Self-demonstrating (the proposal itself conforms to OSSS structure)

Target Audience: Standards authors, working groups, and open-source maintainers who need a proposal structure but don't want to design one from scratch.

2. README.llm vNext — Retrieval-Aware, Multi-File, and Behavioural Extensions

Status: Draft Proposal (v0.1)
Location: README.llms-vNext/readme-llm-vnext.md

An extension to the ReadMe.LLM framework (Wijaya et al., 2025) that adds machine-readable indexing, multi-file documentation sets, retrieval-optimised metadata, and behavioural contract sections. This proposal enables documentation to scale from a single README.llm file for small libraries to navigable, retrieval-efficient corpuses for large SDKs.

Key Features:

• Machine-readable indexing for discovery
• Multi-file documentation architecture
• Retrieval-optimised metadata
• Behavioural contract sections for semantic precision
• Backward-compatible with original ReadMe.LLM format

Target Audience: Library maintainers, SDK authors, CLI tool developers, and documentation platform vendors working with LLM-oriented documentation.

About This Repository

These proposals are designed to be practical, adoptable standards that solve real problems in technical communication. Each proposal:

• Follows the OSSS structure (where applicable)
• Includes clear scope and limitations
• Provides concrete examples and use cases
• Is licensed under MIT for maximum permissiveness

Website and Deployment

This repository includes an Astro site in ai-open-standards/ used to publish the proposals as web pages.

Local run

cd ai-open-standards
npm install
npm run dev

Netlify

Deployment is configured at repository root via netlify.toml:

• Build base: ai-open-standards
• Build command: npm run build
• Publish directory: dist

License

All content in this repository is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2026 Robert Barbour