Governance

Initial stewardship

The initial AQP draft is stewarded by Open Software Network and informed by the production experience of Epode. The protocol and Epode product remain separate: conformance cannot require using Epode or any hosted collector.

Principles

• Protocol decisions favor interoperability over a single implementation.
• Security, privacy, and consent changes require explicit review.
• Normative behavior must be testable.
• Transport bindings remain modular.
• Governance records material decisions and conflicts of interest.

Version decisions

Maintainers may publish editorial clarifications without a new date when they do not change observable behavior. Schema changes, new required behavior, or incompatible semantics require a new dated version and migration guidance.

Future structure

Once multiple independent implementers participate, stewardship should move to a neutral technical steering group with public proposals, recorded decisions, and representation across agent hosts, tool providers, model companies, collectors, and user advocates.