Please find below a high level introduction to the plans for changing the OpenPEPPOL Statutes and revising the PEPPOL e-Delivery operations, together with the call for participation to two new Work Groups.
Below the high level introductions, you will find links to the background documentation and detailed information.
At the 2018 General Assembly, we were not able to obtain the required quorum to vote on the suggested changes to the Statutes. As a result, the Managing Committee will continue to work on streamlining the Statutes, taking into consideration the comments made by members during the General Assembly. The revisions will be made available in Confluence, together with the related background documents from the 2018 General Assembly by end of April in a draft version, inviting the members to comment.
In order to have the Statutes formally approved, OpenPEPPOL will conduct an extraordinary General Assembly in conjunction with the planned Cross-Community meetings October 30th & 31st 2018. It has not yet been decided on which of the two days the General Assembly will be held. We therefore kindly ask you to save both dates until further notice. Invitations and background materials will be made available in Confluence in advance of the meetings, as will access to submission forms for participation and delegation of proxy votes.
The OpenPEPPOL Agreement Change Management Board had two open positions for election in March 2018, however, the call for participation provided only one candidate. Furthermore, the election criteria for the Agreement CMB will change when the revised governance model is implemented. Therefore, the election process was cancelled. As an interim solution, the Agreement CMB has been dissolved and its members together with the members of the Agreement Revision Workgroup have been established as an Agreement Revision Advisory Board.
The board will take no formal decisions regarding change requests but will continue discussing and documenting the impact and proposed implementation. This board will be active until a new formal Change Management Board has been elected in conjunction with the 2019 statutory General Assembly. Changes related to Annex 3 and 4 will, as always be raised to the domain-specific Change Management Boards and should there be a need for decisions regarding changes to the main agreement documents, these will be raised to the Managing Committee.
OpenPEPPOL will migrate to a new PKI Certificate issuing platform in 2018, as the current platform will no longer be supported. As a result, all PEPPOL Access Points and Service Metadata Publishers will be required to implement the capability to support both the new and the old root certificates before September 3rd 2018.
The migration process is planned as follows:
April 11th: the new root certificates are available for download in Confluence at: https://openpeppol.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OPMA/pages/193069072/Introduction+to+the+revised+PKI+Certificate+infrastructure+and+issuing+process
April 16th: the certificate issuing process will begin and members are urged to request their PKI v3 certificate
August 31st: OpenPEPPOL will no longer issue the old certificate types
September 3rd: the new certificates can be used in production
November 30th: the old certificates will be revoked and cannot be used in the PEPPOL eDelivery Network
For details and further information, please see the DRAFT - Introduction to the revised PKI Certificate infrastructure and issuing process and the PKI Certificate Migration 2018 pages.
To strengthen the integrity of the PEPPOL eDelivery Network and establish an aligned on-boarding process for all OpenPEPPOL Service Providers, OpenPEPPOL is taking over responsibility for the acceptance testing from Difi. Therefore it will be mandatory for all Service Providers to succesfully pass the test provided by the centralized test facility in order to obtain a PKI production certificate. This facility will also provide onboarding testing for the AS4 protocol and for SMP Providers. It is currently being developed in cooperation with DG-DIGIT.
OpenPEPPOL has established two new high-level work groups: a Reporting Work Group and a Financial Model Work Group. Both work groups are mandated by the Managing Commitee, owned by Steve Graham (UK Department of Health) and led by Carmen Cicierello.
The Reporting Work Group will focus on establishment of a common set of requirements for usage reporting in the PEPPOL eDelivery Network, and a unified approach to consolidation and presentation of the information collected. Please find the Call for Participation and the Work Group mandate in Confluence (Call for Participation to the Reporting Work Group)
The Financial Model Work Group will focus on identifying the future financial model for OpenPEPPOL, to ensure the optimal economic foundation is in place to run the Association and support the eDelivery Network effectively. Please find the Call for Participation and the Work Group mandate in Confluence. (Call for Participation to the OpenPEPPOL Financial Model Work Group)
We strongly encourage all members to contribute to the ongoing work of the OpenPEPPOL Association, and to submit their interest by sending a mail to openpeppol@peppol.eu. !