Governance

During phase 1, decisions are made by whoever is running OHTL. At the moment that's just one person (see About) but, if you are interested, please consider getting involved. Our working approach to sources during phase 1 is set out on the Sources page.

From phase 2, we will open schema decisions to a working group of outside experts, researchers and organisations, and publish a simple process for proposing and discussing changes.

• Reuse before inventing Use established vocabularies, such as SKOS and Dublin Core, wherever they fit. Add OHTL terms only for genuine gaps, document why, and replace them if a suitable standard emerges.
• Faithful to sources Represent each taxonomy as its publisher wrote it. Never rewrite a publisher's definitions, and keep what the source says distinct from any interpretation.
• Traceable Every published category can be traced to the exact archived edition of the document it came from.
• Stable identifiers Once published, an identifier never changes or disappears. Terms may be deprecated, but not deleted.
• Evidence-led Schema changes are justified by real sources and real use cases, and tested by redoing the transforms before they are adopted.
• Neutral OHTL does not rank, merge or endorse taxonomies. Crosswalks state how categories relate, and are open to challenge.
• Open and recorded Proposals, discussion and decisions happen in public, with the reasons recorded.
• Versioned Releases are numbered 0.x until the schema is stable, and follow semantic versioning from 1.0.

• Phase 2Form a schema working group. Publish these principles for comment, a simple process for proposing changes, and draft policies on how sources are chosen, recorded and kept up to date.
• Phase 3Open the draft schema and crosswalks to public review, and record how feedback was handled.
• Phase 4Agree formal procedures that scale with the number of participants: defined roles such as editors and reviewers, how decisions are reached and what happens when there is no agreement, declarations of interest, and balanced representation of regulators, industry, civil society and research.
• Phase 5Adopt a change process for the stable schema, and arrangements for long-term stewardship so that OHTL does not depend on any one person or organisation.
• Phase 6Run and refine the processes for receiving feedback, engaging the community of users on proposals, and publishing new versions and documentation.

• Representation How should regulators, platforms, safety vendors, civil society and researchers each be represented in decisions?
• Conflicts of interest How should conflicts of interest be handled, for example where a participant sells products built on a taxonomy?
• Disagreements How should disagreements about crosswalks, where experts differ on whether two categories match, be resolved and recorded?
• Licences Which open licences should apply to the schema and the published data?
• Long-term home What long-term organisational home should OHTL have?

If you would like to comment on the draft principles or help build OHTL's governance, email contact@ohtl.org with the subject line "Governance". For other ways to get involved, see Work with OHTL.