ABOUT
About GovSchema
GovSchema is the trusted, versioned, machine-readable contract that lets AI agents understand, validate, and safely prepare government forms and workflows — without guessing from webpages, HTML, or PDFs. Open-source and independent: it describes and verifies government processes; it does not submit them.
AUDIENCES
Who this is for
For agent developers
Consume schemas as structured data with stable identifiers, explicit validation rules, and semantic versioning. Validate your handling of a form against the published schema, pin to a version, and see when a new version supersedes it. Build once against a verified contract instead of scraping and re-scraping a page that can change without notice.
- Machine-readable, JSON Schema–based format
- Versioned with a clear supersession trail
- Every schema carries its source and verification status
For the people agents act for
When an agent helps you renew a passport or register a business, you should be able to trust that it is working from an accurate, current understanding of the real form — not a stale or invented one. GovSchema is the open, independent record of what each government process actually asks for, kept honest by published verification. It is public, open-source, and checkable by anyone.
- Independent and open-source — no product to sell you
- Open and inspectable, not a black box
- Built to be accurate against the real source
INDEPENDENCE
Not a government agency, not a product to sell you
GovSchema is not a government entity, and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or certified by any government. A GovSchema document describes a public process; it never speaks for the authority that runs it, and no schema may claim official status.
GovSchema does not fill out forms or submit anything on anyone's behalf. It publishes the standard layer — the schemas and verification practices — that agents and the tools built on them consume. It is independent and open-source: there is no product being sold here, and the specification, the registry, and the governance process below are all public and inspectable on GitHub.
GOVERNANCE
How decisions get made
- Two-way-door decision reversible
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Most build and editorial work — adding or re-verifying a schema, tooling, docs, and additive changes within one specification line. Handled by maintainers through ordinary pull-request review.
- One-way-door decision hard to reverse
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Stabilizing a specification line, any breaking change, and anything that changes what “verified” means, governance, or licensing. These are proposed in writing and require maintainer sign-off before they merge.
GSP PROCESS
How the specification itself changes: GSPs
Every change to the specification goes through a numbered GovSchema Proposal (GSP) — a written record of the idea, open for anyone to read, before it changes anything. Two real examples: GSP-0001 froze the document envelope that became v0.1, and GSP-0005 added the optional edition axis used by forms like annual tax returns.
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1
Propose
Anyone can write a GSP describing a specification change and why it's needed. Filing one is a two-way door: it records a direction and starts a conversation, but changes nothing in the published specification yet.
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2
Review
Maintainers and contributors discuss the proposal in the open, in the same repository the specification itself lives in — there is no private review track.
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3
Accept
Folding a proposal into the specification is a one-way-door decision: it requires the foundation's maintainer sign-off before it ships, because every published schema will be read against it afterward.
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4
Fold in
An accepted proposal is folded into the next specification release. Nothing is normative until it lands there — a “Proposed” GSP is a discussion, not a rule.
Read the source documents
The governance model, the versioning rules, and every proposal are public — nothing above is a summary of anything private.