Governance

Rebel Trade is the current steward of OptionsSchema: it hosts the registry, publishes releases, runs the reference implementations, and signs each version. Stewardship is administrative — it does not grant unilateral authority over the specification.

A rotating OptionsSchema Working Group (OWG) of 5–9 seats reviews and merges proposals. Seats are held by named individuals from broker engineering, market-data providers, quantitative research, compliance, and independent traders. Seats rotate every 12 months; sitting members nominate replacements.

Interested in a seat? standards@rebeltrade.com.

Changes ship as OSEPs (OptionsSchema Enhancement Proposals). An OSEP must reach rough consensus in the OWG — no more than one strong objection with a written rationale — before it moves to Accepted. The steward publishes the accepted OSEP and bumps the affected schemas.

• Schemas follow semantic versioning per registry entry.
• Once published, a version is immutable — corrections ship as new versions.
• Breaking changes require a major bump and a minimum 6-month deprecation window with field-level x-deprecated annotations.
• Removed fields must remain readable (parsers ignore) for at least one further minor version.

Contributors and OWG members follow the Contributor Covenant v2.1. Violations are reported to the steward and reviewed by two non-involved OWG members.

OptionsSchema is not a regulatory standard, not investment advice, and not affiliated with the OCC, FINRA, SEC, or CBOE. Fields that reference their conventions are convenience mappings only.