Stewardship

Ensuring that information and services can be accessed efficiently, securely, and consistently across digital systems without proprietary barriers or lock-in, that the origin and history of published material are clearly disclosed, and that digital systems are safe, fair, and sustainable for current and future generations

The organisation treats everything it holds, including its records, archives, collections, and what it knows about people, as held in trust, and its governing principles rule out selling or trading any of it.

It plans for the long term: copies are held in multiple locations, people can request and take their data with them, and successors are left a way out of contracts and arrangements that no longer serve them.

Major decisions are weighed for the costs and ongoing obligations they pass on to future staff, future users, and the planet.

The public, its staff, and its governing body are treated fairly and equally, under published equality statements with a plan for constant improvement that is owned, measured, and reported on.

Example requirements

These example requirements are grounded in established international standards, regulations, and laws, which are listed in full in the section below.

Responsibility To The Future

Children, vulnerable groups, and future generations are considered explicitly in the design and deployment of significant digital systems.
Systems are designed to minimise avoidable environmental impact, energy consumption, and unnecessary computational waste.
Environmental impacts of significant digital infrastructure, including energy use and sustainability policies, are publicly documented.
Organisations assess and publish significant long-term social, environmental, and operational risks arising from their digital systems and infrastructure.
Digital records, publications, and public-interest materials are stored in formats intended to remain accessible over time.
Organisations maintain backup, preservation, and continuity plans for important public information and services.
Public-interest digital infrastructure is designed to support long-term civic memory, democratic accountability, cultural continuity, and public access to knowledge.

Interoperability

Information and services are published using open, royalty-free standards wherever possible, rather than proprietary formats or closed technical dependencies.
Core public information uses shared vocabularies, identifiers, and metadata so that people, organisations, places, services, and records can be understood consistently across systems.
Public data is structured to support findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse across systems and institutions.
Public services expose appropriate APIs or equivalent interfaces to allow secure, authorised exchange with other trusted systems.
Systems are designed to avoid unnecessary vendor lock-in and to allow migration to alternative providers without loss of data, service continuity, or public accountability.
Dominant platforms or gatekeeper services that mediate access to public information must not block lawful interoperability, portability, or people’s choice.

Provenance

Published materials include clear authorship identifying the responsible organisation and, where appropriate and safe, the responsible individuals.
Documents, datasets, images, audio, and video retain accessible creation dates, modification dates, embedded metadata (where appropriate), and version histories.
Published materials are referenceable via durable identifiers, and include signatures, credentials, or equivalent mechanisms allowing later verification of authenticity and origin.
Claims, assertions, and published conclusions are linked to supporting evidence, source material, or openly declared absence of evidence.
Corrections, updates, removals, and retractions are visible to readers and linked to earlier published versions.
Organisations maintain auditable records describing how significant published materials were created, edited, reviewed, approved, and modified over time.