FAIR Initiatives
Various FAIR projects or initiatives are overseen directly by Working Groups or by the Technical Steering Committee generally. Broadly, FAIR’s current initiatives are focused in specific areas. Unless otherwise stated, these fall under the TSC’s direct oversight.
Governance
With transparent governance as a core value, The Fair Package Manager will be closely associated with the FAIR Web Foundation, a directed fund within the Linux Foundation that will help provide resources for the project while remaining structurally separate from the goals of the project.
The FAIR Web Foundation is currently working on formalizing a governing board. Once formed, the Foundation will exercise its duties according to the charter it has adopted.
The Technical Steering Committee of the FAIR Package Manager is solely responsible for determining technical direction, governance, and quality of the project. The leadership of the FAIR Package Manager is a triumvirate of three equal co-chairs serving three year terms, rotating annually.
Supply Chain Security
Work is underway to identify and analyze specific risks and threats to the software supply chain, with a view to verifying or enhancing mitigation strategies set in place with the FAIR Protocol.
FAIR Protocol
The initial draft of the FAIR Protocol is based on ATProto and the W3C’s DID Specification. The specifications within the protocol are in review with portions in draft status pending any necessary revisions determined through the implementation process, security reviews, and trust moderation requirements. FAIR recognizes the significant work by Ryan McCue in envisioning and drafting the initial protocol specification in early 2025 for review, revision, and adoption by the TSC.
Trust Moderation (Labeling)
Work is currently underway to refine and ratify the labeling specification, which is based on Bluesky’s moderation architecture, Ozone. FAIR envisions operating a single required labeling service which will assign trust labels to aid with verification with appropriate levels of trust in the identity and/or authenticity of entities and/or packages. A draft specification exists, with a working group tasked with determining the necessary business rules required to establish levels of trust within the FAIR network, or ecosystem.
Software
Under specific working groups, FAIR is publishing software for use in aggregating and serving software packages, labeling packages with specific trust signals, searching for and installing packages from the federated network, serving packages from a synchronized mirror of the WordPress.org repository, and other related packages. These packages consist of WordPress plugins, standalone PHP or other scripting projects, and libraries consisting of reusable PHP classes for inclusion of specific functions within other projects. Not all are WordPress specific. Software releases are licensed under the GPL v.2.0 or later, or under the MIT license. Each software project falls under the auspices of a specific Working Group to publish and maintain the software.
Community
The FAIR project wishes to engage with the WordPress community, as well as the wider Open Source community. To this end, TSC members have been participating in Linux Foundation events, speaking at select gatherings, engaging with podcasts, livestreams, or media outlets to describe our work and raise awareness. While our focus has been on technical design and implementation, coming months will include additional community-building efforts and contributor recruitment for a wide variety of needs in realizing the full potential of the project.
AspirePress & FAIR
AspirePress is a community-driven open-source project aimed at providing resources and tools to improve the lives of WordPress developers everywhere. Independently organized and predating the formation of FAIR, AspirePress is a separate entity.
The two groups have worked in parallel and collaborated from the outset of FAIR. Most notably FAIR works with the AspireCloud project, which indexes and serves alternative download/update links for packages originating from wordpress.org repositories. Originally replicating responses to the WordPress API, AspireCloud’s purpose has expanded to also serve as a FAIR Aggregator for FAIR Repositories as well as existing WordPress packages.
From June 2025, AspirePress and FAIR have collaborated even more closely, forming an AspireCloud Working Group under the FAIR project in July 2025. With neither wanting to compete or duplicate work in reaching the same objectives, we anticipate an ongoing collaboration under the FAIR banner.