Information Mediator Working Group annual charter 2025

 Project Details

Description: The 2025 mission of the Information Mediator Working Group is to further develop the information mediator specification by engaging in a feedback loop with GovStack country engagement teams, software providers, and government representatives.

1. Motivation and Background

The Information Mediator is one of the core GovStack building blocks. It draws heavily from Estonia’s X-Road and other interoperability platforms. Its roots are in the problem governments face when trying to provide secure, reliable, and standardized data exchange between different information systems — both within government agencies and across borders.

Without a mediator, integration is often point-to-point (every system connecting directly to every other system), which becomes expensive, insecure, and unmanageable as the number of systems grows. The Information Mediator solves this by acting as a trusted layer that enforces security, logging, and standardized communication between systems.

The Information Mediator Specification has three main goals:

1. Standardization: define a clear, open standard for how digital government systems should exchange data. This ensures that all parties (ministries, agencies, vendors) implement the same rules.

2. Security and trust: provide a specification that guarantees confidentiality, integrity, and accountability of exchanged data.

3. Interoperability: enable plug-and-play connectivity between systems within a government, or between government and private sector systems, or between governments, without needing custom integrations.

2. Scope for 2025

In 2025, we aim to achieve the following objectives:

• Release at least 2 new major new versions of the specification

• Create machine-readable version of the specification

• Resolve the problem around publish-subscribe in information mediator

• Have at least 2 compliant software solutions

• Support GovStack Deep Dives, including presentation of the specification and discussing the path for adoption in new countries

• Support the start(s) of implementation project(s) in country(ies) that want to adopt GovStack Information Mediator compliant solution(s).

• Support organizations such as EstDev, European Commission, GIZ, ITU in implementation projects.

3. Deliverables

3.1 Activities and Deliverables

https://mediator.govstack.global/ Link to existing specification

3.2 Timeline

Q3: machine-readable version of the specification
October, 2025: version 1.2 published

Q4: two compliant software solutions
December, 2025: version 1.3 published

4. Success Criteria

Each point stipulated in paragraph 2 (Scope for 2025) is to be fully achieved.

5. Coordination

We coordinate the development of our specification with the architecture working group, the GovStack CTO. We closely follow the developments of the identity specification and the workflow specification.

6. Participation

This Working Group currently has around 5-6 active participants, our goal is to have around 10 e active participants by the end of 2026.

Facilitator (Maksim) is to contribute at least 10 working days per month for Information Mediator Working Group and Workflow Working Group activities. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its Slack channel, during the bi-weekly meetings or via private messages.

Participants in the group are required (by the GovStack Meta Specification) to follow the GovStack’s Code of Conduct.

7. Communication

Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Meeting minutes are archived here: Information Mediator Working Group Meeting memos
Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are open to public participation, but require pre-registration via Google Calendar or by informing @Maksim Ovtsinnikov via Slack or via e-mail [maksim.ovtsinnikov[at]gmail.com].

Information about the group, including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings, is available here and in Slack channel.

Information Mediator working group meetings will focus on development of the specification, and are conducted bi-weekly on Thursdays. The date of next meeting can be found in Slack channel.

8. Decision Policy

Mutual consensus within the information mediator working group, and, if needed, architecture working group and the CTO.
If there is no mutual consensus, the opinion of the governance committeehin the information mediator working group, and, if needed, architecture working group and the CTO.
In case consensus is not possible, decisions will be taken with a majority vote of 2/3 of the active working group members.

9. Patent Policy

Patented software should not be included or disclosed during the work of this working group.

10. Patent Disclosures

Patented software should not be included or disclosed during the work of this working group.

11. Licensing

All material published by the working group should be made available free of charge under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or another open source license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

12. About this Charter

1. 12.1 Charter history
   First established in September, 2025.

2. 12.12 Change Log
   Version 0.1 published on 24.09.2025 by @Maksim Ovtsinnikov