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Governance Overview

Benefit Plan Standard operates as an open, community‑driven initiative. To ensure the schema remains fair, transparent, and responsive to stakeholder needs, we follow a formal governance model. This page summarises our mission, values, organizational structure, and decision‑making processes.

Mission and Values​

  • Interoperability: Promote seamless data exchange across carriers, regulators, plan sponsors, and insurtech platforms.
  • Transparency: Maintain open processes and public artefacts so all stakeholders understand how decisions are made.
  • Inclusivity: Invite participation from carriers, technology vendors, healthcare providers, and consumer advocates.
  • Stability and Extensibility: Provide a stable core while enabling new modules and fields as healthcare evolves.

Organizational Structure​

The project is stewarded by a Working Group that includes representatives from carriers, plan sponsors, benefit administrators, and technology providers. Membership is open to any organization willing to commit time and expertise.

Working Group Roles​

  • Chair: Facilitates meetings, sets agendas, ensures consensus, and represents the project externally.
  • Editors: Maintain the schema and documentation; merge approved changes.
  • Contributors: Submit proposals, comment on issues, and help author modules.
  • Observers: Participate in discussions without voting rights.

Decision‑Making Process​

  1. Proposal: Anyone may open a GitHub issue or pull request to propose a new module, field, or change.
  2. Discussion: The Working Group reviews proposals during scheduled calls or via asynchronous discussion. Stakeholders evaluate impact on backwards compatibility and industry needs.
  3. Drafting: Editors refine accepted proposals into draft specifications and update the crosswalk, field definitions, and examples.
  4. Voting: Changes affecting the core schema or existing modules require a majority vote of Working Group members. Minor clarifications and documentation updates may be merged by Editors without a formal vote.
  5. Release: Approved changes are incorporated into the next version (see Versioning & Release Policy). A changelog entry and release notes are published.

Meeting Schedule​

Working Group calls occur monthly, with additional ad‑hoc meetings for urgent proposals. Meeting notes and recordings are published in the /docs/governance/ section and via the project’s public GitHub repository.

Code of Conduct​

We adhere to the Contributor Covenant. Participants are expected to treat others with respect and to foster an environment free of discrimination and harassment. Violations may result in removal from meetings or revocation of contributor rights.