LONDON, June 6, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Accord Project Forum
-- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling
mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of
the Accord Project as a Linux Foundation project. The Accord
Project is a nonprofit organization that builds open source code
and documentation to maintain a common and consistent legal and
technical foundation for contract management. The project comprises
all the software necessary to author, edit and execute smart legal
contracts in a standardized way. Many of the world's largest global
law firms have signed on, as well as leading industry bodies
and technology companies such as DocuSign, IBM, IEEE and R3.
Smart contracts are showing promise for simplifying complexities
in supply chain management and other contract-heavy areas of
technology development, but they also introduce requirements for
interoperability and consistency. The Accord Project provides
a globally interoperable approach for creating contracts that bind
legally enforceable natural language text to executable business
logic. With an increased focus on enterprise digitalization,
adoption of blockchain technologies and the growth of the API
economy, the usage of computable agreements is rapidly increasing.
Having a common format for "computable" legal agreements is an
important cornerstone for the future of commercial relationships.
One of the main purposes of Accord Project is to provide
a vendor-neutral ".doc" format for smart legal agreements.
"The Linux Foundation is home to communities that are advancing
the world's most critical software infrastructure," said
Mike Dolan, VP of strategic programs
at The Linux Foundation. "The Accord Project represents an
opportunity to collaboratively build the framework necessary for
the next generation of contracting. Their work is essential in
supporting the software that runs our lives."
Contract templates are composed of three elements: the Template
Grammar (the natural language text for the template), the Template
Model (the data model that backs the template), and the Logic (the
executable business logic for the template). When combined these
three elements allow templates to be edited, analyzed, queried and
executed. Importantly, the Accord Project's approach does not lock
smart legal contracts into any particular execution environment or
vendor applications. Smart legal contract templates can be used
with a wide variety of technologies, including different types of
distributed ledgers.
The templates are designed to be quick to create from existing
legal contracts and easy to execute using the Ergo domain specific
language. Ergo aims to help legal tech developers quickly and
safely write computable legal contracts. Ergo's other goals are
modularity (reuse of existing contract or clause logic), ensuring
safe execution, neutrality with respect to blockchain
implementation if one is chosen, and being formally specified so
the meaning of contracts is well defined and can be verified and
preserved during execution.
Dan Selman, co-director of the
Accord Project and Chair of its Technology Working Group, noted
that "Our goals for the Accord Project are to promote the use of
open legal technology, attract a self-sustaining base of
contributors, supported by a rigorous governance structure. Linux
Foundation has been an excellent steward to scores of open source
projects, large and small, over many years. We believe Linux
Foundation is the perfect home for Accord Project and look forward
to learning from the collective wisdom of the Linux Foundation
community and taking advantage of the various services and programs
they offer."
Developers, attorneys, business and finance professionals and
other contract users can access the Accord Project online at
accordproject.org and the code at www.github.com/accordproject. For
technical documentation please visit:
https://docs.accordproject.org/
About The Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux
Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the
world's leading home for collaboration on open source software,
open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's
projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including
Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's
methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the
needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create
sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information,
please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses
trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation,
please see its trademark usage page:
www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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