UNTP Core Specification

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Please note that this content is under development and is not ready for implementation. This status message will be updated as content development progresses.

This page describes how the UNTP specification is developed, maintained, and versioned as a UN standard.

UN/CEFACT Framework

UN/CEFACT is the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, established as an intergovernmental body in 1996 with a mandate to develop standards and recommendations for the facilitation of digitalised and sustainable trade. Although UN/CEFACT is a global body, secretariat functions are provided by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The UN/CEFACT mandate, terms of reference, program of work, and related governance documentation is available from the UN/CEFACT policies and procedures. The governance documents are approved by member states at the UN/CEFACT annual plenary.

Standards such as this United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP) and recommendations such as Recommendation 49 "Transparency at scale" are developed under the UN/CEFACT Open Development Process (ODP). UN/CEFACT maintains formal liaison arrangements with other UN organisations as well as other global standards bodies such as ISO, ITU, and IEC following a memorandum of understanding.

Like all UN/CEFACT standards, the UNTP is a voluntary standard that is not mandated by any regulatory framework. Uptake and implementation will be the result of perceived business value. For this reason, UNTP includes business case templates for industry and government to assist implementers with their cost/benefit assessments, and an Impact Assessment Framework that will collect performance metrics from implementers to track UNTP impact on UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Working Groups

UNTP development and maintenance work is coordinated through a steering group, four specialist working groups, and a general update series. See the meetings page for terms of reference, schedules, and meeting notes for each group.

Group	Scope
Steering Group	Overall coordination, consistency across groups, liaison with other DPP initiatives
Adoption Working Group	Business case, implementation guidance, promotion of new implementation commitments
Supply Chain Working Group	DPP, DFR, and DTE specifications
Conformity Working Group	DCC and CVC specifications
Technical Working Group	VCP, DAC, and IDR specifications, reference implementations, test suites
General Updates	Monthly open meetings for observers and the broader community

Participation

Participation in UNTP is open to all. There are two levels of participation.

• Observers — anyone interested to be kept informed and to ask questions may simply subscribe to the UNTP mailing list and slack channel and may join the monthly update meetings.
• Contributors — anyone interested to volunteer their time and knowledge to improve the UNTP specifications. All contributing participants in UN/CEFACT working groups must register as UN experts with the approval of their country head of delegation. All contributing participants must waive their intellectual property rights (IPR) to any contributions under the IPR policy so that UN/CEFACT can continue to publish freely usable standards and recommendations.

All meetings are open and minutes are public. All issues and changes are public and auditable. All work-in-progress and versioned outputs are public and can be freely re-used without limitation.

Change Management

UNTP follows a consensus-driven change management process hosted on the UN GitLab instance. The process is designed for maximum transparency and auditability.

1. Issue — a contributing member raises an issue describing a proposed change, correction, or new feature. Any member can comment and discuss.
2. Merge request — once sufficient discussion has occurred, the contributor lodges a formal merge request with the proposed changes. All merge requests require at least one reviewer to approve.
3. Working group review — approved merge requests are discussed at the relevant working group's fortnightly meeting. Changes are merged if there are no objections.
4. Consensus or vote — if objections cannot be resolved by consensus, the meeting chair holds a vote. A simple majority is required.
5. Publication — merged changes are automatically published to the UNTP website via GitLab Pages.

All issues and merge requests remain publicly visible for scrutiny. For detailed guidance on using the GitLab tools, see Using GitLab.

Version Management

All UNTP artefacts are rigorously versioned following semver best practices.

• Version numbers are indicated as a dot-separated triple {major}.{minor}.{patch}. For example version 2.3.4.
• {patch} version number increments indicate non-breaking bug fixes that do not add new capabilities or features. For example, implementers should see no difference between version 1.4.5 and version 1.4.6.
• {minor} version number increments indicate non-breaking enhancements. For example, implementations of version 1.4.5 are still compatible with version 1.5.0 but may not take advantage of new features.
• {major} version number increments indicate significant and breaking releases. For example implementations of version 1.5.0 will be incompatible with version 2.0.0 and may fail in unpredictable ways.

Note that 0.x.y versions do not strictly follow semver and may include breaking changes in minor versions. However all versions after 1.0.0 first formal release will strictly observe this versioning process.

All versioned artefacts are accessible from the relevant specification page.