The Accord Project has been busy over the summer months!
On June 6th, the Accord Project hosted the Accord Project Forum, a day-long conference that in London that included presentations from the leading organisations involved in the development of Smart Legal Contract technology, applications, and policy including UK LawTech Delivery Panel, ISDA, Law Society, IBM, R3, and many more. The Forum was sponsored by the City of London.
Linux Foundation. One of the major items at the Forum was the Accord Project announcing its acceptance and transition to a top-level project under the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation is one of the world’s leading organizations for open source technology that includes Node.js; OpenAPI; Hyperledger, and many other leading projects. For more information, see the Linux Foundation press release.
Working Groups. The Accord Project has also reorganized its working groups to fall under the auspices of two categories: the Technology Working Groups and the Lifecycle and Industry Working Groups.
The Accord Project Technology Working Group develops open source code libraries and specifications driven by requirements from the other working groups. The goal is to capture the domain-specific legal and transactional knowledge developed within the other working groups in a form that is amenable to automated computation and to bootstrap an ecosystem of companies and organizations that share legal and contract data using well-defined formats that are developed using open tools and libraries.
The Accord Project’s Lifecycle Working Groups focus on the different stages of a contract’s lifecycle, particularly on post-formation stages such as performance, breach, amendments, renegotiation, compliance, ordering and invoicing, and dispute resolution. Lifecycle Working Groups focus on stages of a contract’s lifecycle irrespective of particular industries. An example of a lifecycle working group is the Accord Project Dispute Resolution Working Group. The Accord Project’s Industry Working Groups focus on particular industries and business applications. These working groups may include supply chain, financial services, and intellectual property. An example of an industry working group is the Accord Project’s Real Estate Working Group.
Open Source Technology. Recent updates from the Technology Working Group include:
- An updated Template Studio for building and editing smart legal contracts (WIP). The new user interface designs are available here. The new version of Template Studio is modularized as a series of reusable components, including:
- A rich text contract editor with markdown support (see below) to build contracts as structured data objects
- A Logic Editor
- A Model Editor to edit the data model that underpin contracts
- Support for contract forms
- Template Libraries, enabling you display clause and contract templates
- Components to test contracts to ensure correct execution
- Contract navigation support in a left pane
- Navigation to specific parsing errors
Template Studio Contract Editor- Compilation support for the Java Virtual Machine; enabling Ergo to run on JVM-based targets such as R3’s Corda (see Smart Legal Contracts on Enterprise Blockchains: A Corda Example);
- New features for the Cicero templating system, including:
- Human-readable template naming
- Rich text syntax and dynamic templates
- Offline support
- Generate contract text from JSON
- Cicero UI components (as used by Template Studio)
- New features for the Ergo contract language for smart legal contracts:
- Improved error handling and reporting
- New built-in functions and compiler warnings
- Redesigned execution engine and API
- Launch of Concerto and Concerto Tools – a schema language and runtime for modeling contracts and business processes convertible to other formats: JSON Schema, XML Schema, Java, Go, Typescript, Loopback, PlantUML, etc.
If you have any questions or would like to get further involved, please contact the Project at admin@accordproject.org.