Introduction

Edoxen is a Ruby gem + JSON Schema for representing any meeting — its agenda, motions, votings, decisions, attendance, minutes, and recurrence — in a structured, machine-readable, multilingual format.

What problem does it solve?

Different meeting-publishing domains have invented their own formats: PDFs of parliamentary Hansard, Word documents of ISO resolutions, XML for IETF meetings, custom databases for board portals. Even within one domain, formats drift across years and vendors.

Edoxen provides:

1. A generic core information model that captures the universal elements of any meeting — its identifier, venues, officers, agenda, the procedural record (motions, votings), and the formal outcomes (decisions).
2. A profile mechanism (ISO 8601-2 §15) so adopters can extend the core for their domain — parliamentary (LegCo, Congress), standards (ISO, OIML), technical (IETF, W3C), corporate governance — without forking the core.
3. A YAML wire format that is human-readable, easy to diff, and easy to edit.
4. A JSON Schema that locks the format so consumers can validate what they receive.
5. A Ruby library for parsing, building, and serializing meeting data programmatically.

Who is it for?

• Standards bodies (ISO, IEC, ITU, BIPM, OIML, ILO) publishing formal decisions.
• Parliamentary bodies (UK Hansard, HK LegCo, US Congress) modeling bills, motions, divisions, and votes.
• Technical communities (IETF, W3C, Apache) tracking WG meetings and draft approvals.
• Academic conferences (Crossref-registered) with peer-reviewed proceedings.
• Corporate boards with quarterly governance cycles.
• Anyone who needs a structured record of who met, what they discussed, how they voted, and what they decided.

Quick example

identifier:
  - prefix: ACME
    number: "2026-Q1-Board"
urn: urn:acme:board:meeting:2026-q1
type: board_meeting
status: completed
visibility: confidential

date_range:
  start: 2026-03-15
  end: 2026-03-15

venues:
  - kind: physical
    name: Acme Boardroom
    unlocode: USNYC
    country_code: US
  - kind: virtual
    name: Video Conference
    uri: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/acme-board
    features: [audio, video, screen]

officers:
  - role: chair
    person: { name: Ms. Eleanor Vance }
  - role: secretary
    person: { name: Mr. James Okafor }

motions:
  - identifier: motion-dividend-2026-q1
    text: |
      I move that the Board declare a quarterly dividend of $0.45
      per share.
    status: carried
    resulting_decision: urn:acme:board:decision:2026-q1-dividend

votings:
  - on_motion: urn:acme:board:motion:2026-q1-dividend
    status: decided
    voting_method: roll_call
    result: passed
    counts: { ayes: 4, noes: 2 }

decisions:
  - identifier:
      - prefix: ACME
        number: "2026-Q1-001"
    kind: order
    status: decided
    urn: urn:acme:board:decision:2026-q1-dividend
    localizations:
      - language_code: eng
        title: Board Order Declaring Q1 2026 Dividend
        actions:
          - type: orders
            message: |
              The Board orders a quarterly dividend of $0.45
              per share, payable April 15, 2026.

Where to next?

• Architecture — the generic-core-plus-profile design, the procedural state machines, and the multilingual plumbing.
• Migration to 1.0 — coming from legacy (Resolution → Decision rename + new entities).
• Installation — set up the gem in your project.
• Meetings — the event-grain container.
• Procedural core — Motion → Voting → Decision.
• Profile mechanism — how adopters extend the core.
• Schema — the full JSON Schema reference.
• CLI — edoxen validate and edoxen normalize from the command line.