Governance
OCP is governed by a proposed community foundation comprising four bodies:
The Technical Steering Committee (seven elected members, two-year terms) owns the protocol specification and approves breaking changes, which require a supermajority of five of seven votes and a 12-month deprecation notice.
The Security Working Group (five appointed members with cryptography and security expertise) manages vulnerability disclosure, coordinates patches, and conducts quarterly security audits of reference implementations.
The Ethics Advisory Board (five members from academia, civil society, and industry) reviews extensions and use cases for ethical concerns and publishes guidelines for responsible AI-to-AI collaboration.
The Community Council (five elected members, one-year terms) represents the contributor community, manages Code of Conduct enforcement, and organizes community events.
The protocol follows semantic versioning. Domain-specific extensions are governed by their respective maintainers but must register in the OCP Extension Registry, pass the compliance test suite, and not conflict with the core specification.
From Policy to Practice
Governance provides the framework for decision-making, but the Reference Implementation is where those decisions are codified. To see how the protocol's architecture and governance come to life in a functional environment, explore our implementation guide.