New Zealand open standards initiative
Assurance information that can move between organisations.
Workplace assurance information should be portable, independently verifiable, and exchangeable without requiring every organisation to use the same software platform.
Compete on assurance management.
Cooperate on assurance exchange.
The same information, entered again and again
New Zealand organisations rely on digital systems to manage worker qualifications, competency, training, licences, inductions, contractor prequalification, insurance, and supporting evidence.
These systems provide real value. The difficulty is that the exchange of assurance information is often coupled to the platform used to manage it.
A contractor may already hold verified competency information for its workers, and still be required to recreate those workers and their records inside a customer's nominated system. A supplier may maintain substantially the same organisational information across several prequalification schemes, procurement systems, customer portals, and tenders.
A common questionnaire helps organisations ask more consistent questions. The next question is whether valid, current, independently verifiable information should have to be supplied again at all.
An open exchange layer, not another platform
OpenAssurance is not a proposal for a national database, a compulsory worker passport, or another assurance product. It is a proposal to define how assurance records can be issued, held, shared, received, and independently verified — so that existing and future systems can exchange them directly.
Open data schemas alone do not achieve this. A schema can be public while the operational pathway for sending or receiving the information still requires platform membership, enterprise licensing, tenant setup, or duplicate records. So the test is deliberately stricter:
Can Organisation A send a valid assurance record to Organisation B when neither organisation is a customer of the other's software provider?
The core interoperability test
The receiving organisation always decides what it requires and accepts. OpenAssurance makes information portable, attributable, and verifiable — it does not decide who is competent or which contractor is acceptable.
Two initial profiles
OpenAssurance is the umbrella initiative. Its first two profiles apply the same exchange model to people and to organisations.
OpenCompetency
Qualifications, licences, training, practical competency, assessments, experience, inductions, employer attestations, and authorisations — with the original issuer of each record remaining identifiable.
opencompetency.nzOpenPrequal
Prequalification assessments, insurance, health and safety systems, risk management, incident and plant management, declarations, and supporting evidence — with evidence kept separate from any one assessor's conclusion.
openprequal.nzFewer copies, not more
Assurance records about people are personal information. Every duplicate record is another place requiring access control, security, correction, retention, and breach management.
OpenAssurance is designed around purpose-specific presentation rather than wholesale sharing. A customer needing evidence that a worker satisfies one role should not receive that worker's complete competency and employment history. Personal information should be private by default, and the standard should avoid creating a universal worker identifier that enables tracking across unrelated organisations.
Are we reducing the amount of personal information organisations need to duplicate and disclose, or are we creating another place to copy it?
The core privacy test
A formal Privacy Impact Assessment will form part of developing any stable specification.
Founding principles
Offered for discussion, and set out in full in the project charter.
- No mandatory platform. Exchange must not require a shared subscription.
- No mandatory central registry. Not another central database.
- Portable records. Changing provider must not invalidate a record.
- Independent verification. Verifiable without platform membership.
- Local acceptance. The receiving organisation decides.
- Issuer provenance. Sharing a record does not make you its issuer.
- Open exchange. No bilateral proprietary integrations required.
- Privacy by design. Purpose-bound and limited to what is necessary.
- No universal worker identifier. No tracking across unrelated organisations.
- Small organisations can participate. No specialist IT infrastructure needed.
- Reuse existing standards first. Prefer established open standards.
- Vendor neutrality. Providers compete on services around the exchange layer.
What OpenAssurance is not
Existing competency, prequalification, assessment, and contractor-management products should be able to support OpenAssurance without abandoning their commercial models. They continue to compete on assessment, workflow, reporting, automation, and user experience. What changes is that the underlying record can move.
- Not a national worker database
- Not a compulsory competency passport
- Not a prequalification provider
- Not an assessment company
- Not a training provider
- Not an accreditation authority
- Not a central issuer registry
- Not a replacement for existing assessment schemes
- Not a replacement for commercial assurance software
Where this is up to
OpenAssurance is an early-stage proposal, not a completed standard. No exchange protocol, schema, or conformance suite exists yet.
- Validate the problem Current Test the problem and assumptions with contractors, buyers, asset owners, regulators, industry organisations, assessment providers, and technology providers.
- Map existing standards Identify what already exists and should be adopted rather than recreated.
- Define the minimum exchange model A small v0.1 specification covering only what interoperability requires.
- Demonstrate two reference exchanges One competency example, one prequalification example.
- Develop conformance tests Define what a system must support before claiming compatibility.
- Establish longer-term governance Determine an independent stewardship model based on industry participation.
Questions we would like answered
The discussion paper sets out the problem, the proposed model, and the open questions in full. Disagreement is genuinely useful at this stage — including reasons the approach will not work.
- How much assurance information is actually duplicated across New Zealand organisations, and where does it cost the most?
- Are competency and prequalification the right first use cases?
- What is the minimum information that needs to move between systems?
- How should organisations express which issuers they recognise?
- How can existing platforms participate without losing the value of their own products?
- Who should steward an open New Zealand assurance standard?