About

Background

OpenAssignment and its sister standard OpenConsultant share one ambition: to bring assignments and consultants closer together by making information available directly from the source.

The company that needs expertise publishes its assignments on its own website. The consulting company that offers the expertise publishes its consultants on its own website. Agencies, platforms and other services can then search, match, qualify and help the parties find each other, without having to create and maintain their own copies of the original information.

Today the description of an assignment is recreated in every place where someone might look for it. The copies have to be maintained separately, they go out of date, and it becomes hard to tell where the information came from. OpenAssignment gives each assignment one original, kept current by the company that needs the work.

It should be as natural for a company to publish its consulting assignments on its own website as it is to publish its products, services or contact details there.

The information stays at the source. The market connects around it.

A better foundation for everyone

Open standards don’t remove the need for expertise in sourcing, matching or procurement. They remove the need to maintain the same information in multiple places.

Agencies and platforms remain free to build services around the information: helping companies discover talent, evaluating candidates, coordinating assignments and managing relationships. Open and current information makes that work easier, not redundant.

The difference is that the original information stays with the company that owns it.

Principles

1. Open. The specification, schemas and examples are free to use, without registration.
2. Decentralised. Information is published on the publisher’s own website. No central database is needed.
3. Machine readable. Data is available as JSON at ordinary HTTPS addresses.
4. Human readable. The same information can be presented as ordinary web pages.
5. System independent. The files can be produced by any CMS, business system or home-made solution.
6. Voluntary. You can use OpenAssignment without using OpenConsultant, and the other way round.
7. Extensible. New fields can be introduced without breaking existing implementations.
8. Versioned. The format has documented versions and a changelog.

What the project is not

OpenAssignment is not a job board, a marketplace or a matching service. It does not collect assignments, handle applications or compete with agencies, platforms or business systems. It is shared, open infrastructure: a description of a file format and where to put the files, free for anyone to use and build on.

A sister standard

OpenConsultant is for the other side of the market: consulting companies publish their consultants, skills and availability on their own websites. The two standards share vocabulary and structure, so that an assignment’s requirements and a consultant’s skills can be compared. Neither requires the other.

Stewardship

OpenAssignment is initiated and maintained by Wish You Were Here, a consulting company in Sweden. The standard is in an early, experimental phase. It will be shaped by the organisations that try it.

The source for the specification, the schemas and this website will be published in a public repository, where questions, problems and proposals can be raised as issues.

Licence

• Schemas, example files and code: MIT licence.
• Specification text and documentation: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

You are free to implement the standard in any product, commercial or not.