About

The Accord Project is a non-profit, collaborative, initiative developing an ecosystem and open source tools for smart legal contracts. Open source means that anyone can freely use and contribute to development.

Smart agreements promise to reduce friction and transaction costs in the creation and management of contracts and commercial relationships. Enabling this future requires the necessary tools to format, share, execute, and manage legally enforceable machine-readable agreements.

The Accord Project establishes and maintains a technology neutral foundation for smart legal contracts. The goal is to provide universal technology and tooling that:

Introduces a common format for smart agreements, reducing the need to adopt and learn different technologies and futureproofing templates
Enables sharing and reuse of agreement templates
Facilitates the use of executable agreements across any infrastructure: cloud, blockchain, IoT
Interoperates with any distributed ledger and blockchain platform, today and in the future

Provides domain specific functionality, meaning it is purposely designed and engineered for building and running commercial agreements, not generic applications

Features

Discover the benefits of Accord Project Powered Smart Agreements

01.

Built for Commercial Agreements

The open source technology projects are specifically designed to enable users to templatize the natural language of any type of contract and integrate with smart contract logic developed for expressing and modeling legal concepts, clauses, and obligations.

02.

Open Source

All software and documentation are open source enabling anyone to use, and extend the core functionality within, and for, their application or project. Accord Project software is maintained and governed through the Linux Foundation.

03.

Common Format

The technology stack provides a common ‘.doc’ format for smart agreement templates meaning that contracting parties and users can develop contracts using the same core structure and specification, reducing focus on the technology and promoting ease of use.

04.

Technology Agnostic

Using a common format enables contracts to be useable across technologies without the overhead of changing the agreement. Accord Project templates can be used without reliance upon a particular technology such as a certain blockchain protocol, making templates futureproof and portable.

05.

Extensible Models and Templates

The stack is built to be extensible to enable the use and reuse of domain models and templates for both full smart contracts and individual clauses. This helps to create a mature, progressive, foundation upon which to build smart agreements.

06.

Community Driven

Building the future of contracting should be collaborate. The Accord Project is supported by organizations leading the development of smart documentation including DocuSign, xDTM Standard Association, IACCM, IBM and more.

How is the Accord Project Governed?

The Accord Project is governed through the Linux Foundation — the leading organization for the management of open source software projects. The codebase is maintained by a Technical Steering Committee and open source contributors.

Technical Steering Committee

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) plays an important role in setting up priorities and in providing guidance to the Accord Project Technology Working Group.

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