Governance Overview

Governance Intent

Passport Alliance governance is designed to keep APIS open while preventing trust fragmentation and spoofed issuer legitimacy.

The Alliance does not prevent protocol implementation. It governs recognition in the public trust registry.

Committees

Steering Committee

• Strategic direction
• Membership and certification decisions
• Dispute and incident resolution

Technical Committee

• APIS evolution and version control
• Test suite definition
• RFC review and ratification recommendations

Working Groups

Ad-hoc groups for focused domains such as security, enterprise, government, and AI safety.

Issuer Tiers

Tier	Description
founding	Original standards initiator
certified	Fully audited APIS issuer
registered	Self-attested issuer
sandbox	Development/testing issuer

Certified Issuer Expectations

To maintain certified status, issuers must:

• implement APIS v1 required fields and flows
• pass automated conformance suite
• complete security review
• publish issuance/revocation/key policies
• support incident response obligations

Registry Governance

The Alliance publishes a signed issuer registry used by verifiers as trust input. Member mirrors can distribute copies, but only Alliance keys sign authoritative changes.

See Registry Signing Model for details.