Roadmap

This roadmap is intentionally practical. It focuses on the moves that most improve implementability and adoption.

Immediate priorities

1. Tighten discovery conventions ✓

Discovery is now documented in docs/discovery.md with concrete endpoint patterns, curl examples, and a client-side checklist. The reference client (scripts/client_demo.py) implements discovery programmatically.

2. Add conformance and validation guidance ✓

A lightweight conformance profile and validation guide now live in conformance/. The validation script runs in CI on every push and PR via .github/workflows/validate.yml. The conformance/validation-guide.md covers local runs, manual payload validation, and evidence expectations for conformance claims.

3. Expand examples into end-to-end flows ✓

examples/end-to-end/README.md covers four complete flows with step-by-step curl commands and Python verification logic: key discovery, revocation checking, membership validation, and historical audit lookup.

4. Clarify versioning policy ✓

docs/versioning-policy.md now defines patch/minor/major compatibility rules, schema evolution cases (adding optional fields, adding required fields, removing fields, changing types), deprecation behavior, and experimental feature handling.

5. Improve contribution process ✓

docs/protocol-change-process.md defines the Protocol Change Proposal (PCP) process with a structured issue template, lifecycle labels, and acceptance criteria. CONTRIBUTING.md is updated to reference it.

Medium-term priorities

  • More schema families for common trust use cases. ✓ endpoint.json added for service endpoint advertisement.
  • Example client and server implementations. ✓ scripts/client_demo.py is a reference CLI client covering discover, query, lookup, revocation check, and local validation.
  • Better federation and cross-registry discovery guidance. ✓ docs/federation.md covers reference records, namespace delegation, and cross-registry consumer patterns.
  • Ecosystem mappings beyond current included schemas. ✓ docs/compare-and-position.md now covers DID resolution, OpenID Federation, TRAIN, Verifiable Data Registries, and Beckn registries.

Strategic goal

The long-term goal should be simple: make DeDi feel less like an interesting concept and more like a protocol developers can confidently build into real systems.