OpenERS Foundation

Governance body for the OpenERS open standard — cross-organisation life-safety record exchange.

Provisional Foundation period

The OpenERS Foundation is currently in provisional stewardship by Point Systems Ltd per ADR-004 — Provisional Foundation Operating Model. The Foundation's technical surface (this site) is operational; the Foundation as a legal entity has not yet incorporated. See About for the named conflict-of-interest declaration and the time-bounded transition triggers that end the provisional period.

What this site is

OpenERS is an open standard for describing emergency readiness — built environments, the people who occupy them, what they need to evacuate safely, and how that information is exchanged between the parties responsible for their safety. The standard is governed by the OpenERS Foundation. This site is the Foundation's technical surface: the live, signed artefacts that downstream OpenERS implementations consult to verify records and check regulatory authorities.

The standard itself — schemas, documentation, conformance test fixtures — lives in the OpenERS spec repository. This site holds the Foundation's runtime attestations: the Trust List, the Statutory Authority Registry records, and the DID document that grounds them all.

What is published here

/.well-known/did.json The Foundation's W3C DID Core 1.0 document, resolving did:web:openers.org.uk. Carries the public key under which the Foundation signs the Trust List and Statutory Authority records.
/trust-list/v1/current.json The current Foundation Trust List. A signed list of every DID the Foundation has attested as a conformant participant, with the participant's trust state (Active / Membership-overdue / Supervised / Revoked-with-cause / Historically-active).
/statutory-authority/v1/index.json Index of Statutory Authority records — foundation-attested interpretations of statutory instruments (FSO 2005, FRSA 2004 ss.7-8, DPA 2018 Schedule 1 paragraph 18, RPEEP regs, CCA 2004 §15) during the provisional period.
/conformance/ Pointer to the load-bearing conformance test fixtures published with v1.0.0-rc.1.
/governance/about.html Provisional Foundation statement, conflict-of-interest declaration, transition triggers, and quarterly publication cadence.

Why this matters

An OpenERS-conformant deployment — a Fire and Rescue Service receiving a PEEP at an incident, a housing association sharing PEEPs with the FRS, a verifier checking a signed record's provenance — depends on a stable, signed Foundation surface. The Trust List answers “is this signer attested to be conformant?”. The Statutory Authority records answer “is the cited regulatory basis authoritative?”. The DID document answers “what is the public key the Foundation is signing with right now?”.

This site is the production answer to those three questions. If you are an OpenERS implementer, you point your verifier at this domain and the rest is signature mathematics.

For different audiences

If you are evaluating OpenERS for procurement — read About first to understand the provisional period and the named conflict of interest. Then see the three audience-specific briefings (FRS-receiving capability, UK emergency interop landscape, building-side duty-holder procurement).

If you are an OpenERS implementer — the spec quickstart is your starting point. Your verifier should fetch this domain's DID document, Trust List, and Statutory Authority records as part of its normal verification path.

If you are a regulator (Cabinet Office, NFCC, MHCLG, Home Office, BSR, ICO, DSIT/OfDIA) — the provisional Foundation specifically welcomes engagement during the v1.0.0 RC cycle. See About §“Contact and engagement.”

If you are a Fire and Rescue Service or building duty-holder — the operational briefings linked from the spec repo describe how to engage. The Foundation surface itself is the technical anchor your eventual vendor will reference.

Verification round-trip

The Foundation's technical surface is operational when the following round-trip succeeds:

  1. Resolve did:web:openers.org.uk by fetching /.well-known/did.json with valid TLS.
  2. Extract the Foundation's Ed25519 public key from the DID document.
  3. Fetch /trust-list/v1/current.json and verify its signature under that public key.
  4. Fetch each Statutory Authority record from the index and verify each signature under the same public key.
  5. Confirm that did:web:openers.org.uk is itself listed as an Active participant in the Trust List.

The published verifier in the Foundation operations repository runs this check after every publication. If you are integrating an OpenERS verifier, this is the test it must pass.