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Weeknote #5: w/c 2023-09-11

Hi all. It's Simon here again with another tariff data standards weeknote.

This week we have been designing governance for the standard. The proposed governance model is here, but in a nutshell, we're proposing:

• Structural and semantic meaning of the data will be covered by the standard, what's actually in the data or trade policy itself will not.
• We'll have an open discussion forum and favour working asynchronously, with synchronous video call meetings only when needed.
• There'll be a group of stakeholders who will represent the needs of government and industry. Changes to the standard (including its governance arrangements) will need unanimous approval of this group.

We have organised a first meeting of the stakeholder group for next Friday where we'll (hopefully) be agreeing this first set of mechanisms by which we'll manage the standard together.

Having an open standard means we govern in the open. We're proposing to use Github Discussions as a place to share agendas, papers and minutes for all of the meetings that we have because it's simple to use, attached to the documentation repository and open by default.

Our meetings will be open too. We're targeting having a core set of stakeholders that we know run systems consuming tariff data. Other interested parties or users we don't know about yet are also encouraged to attend. Video call links will be shared openly. Check out the Discussions board for links of future meetings.

Our slot at the Peer Review Group has moved – now we'll be presenting our work on the w/c 25th September instead. That's good news because it means we can have our first meeting of the standards group beforehand!

That's it for this week. Tune in next week to hear about how our first governance meeting went!