Transparent and Open BCP Development Process for GCVE

Overview

The GCVE project follows a fully transparent and traceable process for developing Best Current Practices (BCPs).

All discussions, proposals, reviews, and decisions related to BCPs are conducted openly on the GCVE Discourse platform operated by ossbase.org:

👉 All BCP GCVE discussions are available at https://discourse.ossbase.org/c/gcve/14

This approach is intentionally designed to support open standardization, community trust, and rapid adoption by implementers.

One Thread per BCP or Topic

Each BCP (or exploratory topic that may lead to a BCP) is discussed in a dedicated Discourse thread.

This thread becomes the single source of truth for:

  • Problem statements and motivation
  • Design proposals and alternatives
  • Technical discussions and trade-offs
  • Community feedback and objections
  • Iterative refinements
  • Final consensus and closure

This structure makes it possible to reconstruct why a decision was made, not just what was decided.

As an example, BCP-05 (thread: 121) overall discussion can be exported at the following url: https://discourse.ossbase.org/raw/121.

Full Traceability by Design

The Discourse-based workflow provides:

  • Complete historical traceability Every message, edit, and decision is timestamped and preserved.

  • Transparent governance Anyone can follow how a BCP evolved from idea to accepted practice.

  • Accountability and clarity Contributors, reviewers, and decision points are visible and attributable.

This level of transparency is often missing in traditional standards bodies and is particularly valuable for security-related specifications.

The full dump of each discussion thread will be included as part of the BCP’s standard publication process.

Enabling Faster and Safer Standardization

Because discussions happen in the open and are continuously documented:

  • Contributors can review context quickly without relying on private meetings or undocumented decisions.
  • Implementers can start prototyping early, even before a BCP is finalized.
  • Feedback loops are shorter, allowing faster convergence on workable solutions.
  • Diverging viewpoints are resolved publicly, improving technical quality and legitimacy.

This significantly reduces the time between idea, consensus, and real-world deployment.

Direct Impact on Software Implementation

The BCP threads serve not only as governance artifacts but also as living design documentation:

  • Developers can directly reference discussions when implementing support in tools and platforms.
  • Ambiguities are resolved in public, reducing inconsistent implementations.
  • Changes or clarifications can be introduced without breaking the historical record.

This model aligns particularly well with GCVE’s goal of enabling rapid, decentralized, and interoperable vulnerability data publication.

A Model for Open Security Standards

By combining:

  • open discussions,
  • persistent public archives,
  • and iterative refinement,

the GCVE BCP process demonstrates a practical and modern approach to standardization—one that matches the pace and transparency expectations of today’s security ecosystem.

This process ensures that GCVE standards are not only technically sound, but also credible, auditable, and easy to adopt.