Stewardship & governance

Who stewards the IOM.

An open standard still needs an owner of the work — someone to convene the contributors, maintain the text, and keep it honest. That role is the curator. The standard itself stays open.

Founding member & curator

BrightTech.ai is the founding member and curator of the IOM.

BrightTech.ai convened the working group, authored the v1.0 draft, and maintains the standard’s editorial process and release cadence. As founding member, it committed the initial work to establish this as an open standard rather than a product.

Curation is the work of maintaining an open standard — convening contributors, editing the text, shipping versions. It is not ownership of the category, and it is not control of conformance.

Curation is not control

The standard stays open — including from its curator.

The credibility of a standard depends on it not being captured by any one vendor — including the one that started it. Four commitments hold that line:

Open license

Published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone may read, implement, adapt, and redistribute it with attribution.

Public comment

v1.0 is a draft, open for revision through public review and versioned change memos.

No vendor sets direction

No single company’s product roadmap — including BrightTech.ai’s — determines what the standard requires.

Conformance is earned

Conformance is defined by the standard and demonstrable by any implementation — never granted by a member, including the curator.

How it is governed

Open review. Public versions. Attributable change.

Changes are proposed and refined through open review and shipped as versioned releases with public change memos, so the direction of the standard is legible to everyone who implements it. The curator maintains the process; the working group shapes the content.

Founding members

Founding members shape v1.0.

A category is stronger when more than one organization stands behind it. We’re convening a small group of practitioner-led organizations to contribute to the v1.0 standard as founding members — before it finalizes.

Become a founding member Read the standard