The following is a proposal for the development of technical specifications by the Technical Action Group. It is still under review, and thus suggestions for modifications are still welcomed.

Overview

The Technical Action Group will produce two types of documents, being

Technical Recommendation - recommends a specific technology for use as part of the Data Portability stack. It contains information such as a description of the technology, the problem that it solves, and why it was selected over the competition.
Technical Implementation - recommends a specific method of using a recommended technology. It may link multiple technologies, but cannot require a non-recommended technology. It may, however, propose methods for making non-recommended technologies interoperate with recommended ones.

Proposal Mechanism

Proposals for a new recommendation or implementation may be proposed by anyone. This should be done via the Data Portability Technical mailing list. Upon gaining support from three other users on the mailing list, the proposal will be allocated a sequential identifier in the form DP-REC-xxx or DP-IMPL-xxx (either a recommendation or implementation respectively).

A new specification will be marked as "experimental", and submitted drafts will be considered valid for 3 months. If an experimental specification sees updated drafts, or fails to move on in state within the 3 month validity period, then it will be marked as "inactive". Issuance of a new draft will move the specification back to experimental.

A specification will be a candidate for moving to "Approved" upon the follow conditions being met:

Sufficient backing has been gained within the Technical Action Group.
There is demonstrable traction within public implementations.

A technical implementation may not be moved into the Approved state unless the technical recommendations of all required technologies are already in the Approved state.

Templates

When creating a new recommendation or implementation, the following templates should be used: