About

Background

OpenConsultant and its sister standard OpenAssignment share one ambition: to bring consultants and assignments closer together by making information available directly from the source.

The consulting company that offers expertise publishes its consultants on its own website. The company that needs expertise publishes its assignments on its own website. Agencies, platforms and other services can then search, match, qualify and help the parties find each other, without having to create and maintain their own copies of the original information.

Today a consultant’s profile is recreated in every system where someone might look for it. The copies have to be maintained separately, they go out of date, and it becomes hard to tell where the information came from. OpenConsultant gives each profile one original, kept current by the company that offers the consultant.

It should be as natural for a consulting company to publish its consultants on its own website as it is to publish its services or contact details there.

The information stays at the source. The market connects around it.

A better foundation for everyone

Open standards don’t remove the need for expertise in sourcing, matching or procurement. They remove the need to maintain the same information in multiple places.

Agencies and platforms remain free to build services around the information: helping companies discover talent, evaluating candidates, coordinating assignments and managing relationships. Open and current information makes that work easier, not redundant.

The difference is that the original information stays with the company that owns it.

Principles

1. Open. The specification, schemas and examples are free to use, without registration.
2. Decentralised. Information is published on the publisher’s own website. No central database is needed.
3. Machine readable. Data is available as JSON at ordinary HTTPS addresses.
4. Human readable. The same information can be presented as ordinary web pages.
5. System independent. The files can be produced by any CMS, business system or home-made solution.
6. Voluntary. You can use OpenConsultant without using OpenAssignment, and the other way round.
7. Extensible. New fields can be introduced without breaking existing implementations.
8. Versioned. The format has documented versions and a changelog.

What the project is not

OpenConsultant does not own consultant information, does not collect CVs and does not compete with agencies, platforms or business systems. It is not a marketplace, a register or a matching service. It is shared, open infrastructure: a description of a file format and where to put the files, free for anyone to use and build on.

A sister standard

OpenAssignment is for the other side of the market: companies that need expertise publish their consulting assignments on their own websites. The two standards share vocabulary and structure, so that a consultant’s skills and an assignment’s requirements can be compared. Neither requires the other.

Stewardship

OpenConsultant is initiated and maintained by Wish You Were Here, a consulting company in Sweden. The standard is in an early, experimental phase. It will be shaped by the organisations that try it.

The source for the specification, the schemas and this website will be published in a public repository, where questions, problems and proposals can be raised as issues.

Licence

• Schemas, example files and code: MIT licence.
• Specification text and documentation: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

You are free to implement the standard in any product, commercial or not.