Volunteers

Practical ways to help steward the open TLA-185 specification — documentation, schema review, crosswalks, and community outreach — while the Foundation operates under interim draft governance.

Why volunteer

An open metadata standard only works if practitioners, researchers, and institutions can read, test, and improve it together. Volunteers extend what a small interim working group can maintain on its own.

Contributions are unpaid and optional. They advance documentation, schema review, and community outreach for the public specification. Membership, governance participation, and commercial licensing follow separate published processes.

Technical reviewers & registry contributors

A curated intake for people who can stress-test field-dictionary corners, conformance notes, and registry clarity.

Public GitHub write access may remain limited while access controls are reviewed. Email critique, annotated pack review, and structured application notes are welcome and sufficient.

Select Technical reviewer or Registry contributor in the application below. We match a small number of applicants to published needs; most expressions of interest will not receive an immediate placement.

Technical reviewers — schema pack clarity, examples, Evidence Checker–compatible fixtures, edge-case definitions
Registry contributors — preferred labels, synonyms, regional module notes, citation hygiene
Outside scope for this intake: unpaid product QA for commercial tooling, or unrestricted dumps of proprietary trait engines

Apply — curated intake Truth-tellers programme Evidence Checker

Ways to contribute

Schema and documentation review — clarity, examples, and conformance notes on the schema portal
Crosswalk and mapping work — Revit, GIS, nursery, and council exchange profiles
Truth-telling field trials — documenting how claims are evidenced in real project bundles
Translation and accessibility — plain-language summaries and screen-reader-friendly docs
Community outreach — university studios, public-sector briefings, and practitioner roundtables

How to start

The schema portal and field dictionary are the published entry points for technical contributions. For structured volunteer onboarding, working-group placement, or institutional partnership, use the application form below so contributions can be matched to published needs.

Until a suitable independent entity is established, volunteer coordination runs through The Landscape Archive Pty Ltd as interim implementation partner. Submissions land in private R2 under foundation-volunteer-applications/ with admin email notification when mail is configured.

Apply here Open specification repository