We're proposing an open standard for Canada's strata and condo data. Help us build it.

A strata corporation in Kelowna and one in Burnaby keep the same records. Each has lots and owners, a council, minutes and resolutions, an operating fund and a contingency reserve, a list of repairs, and an insurance policy that renews every year. The same Strata Property Act describes them both.

Ask two pieces of software to describe that strata, though, and you'll get two different answers. One calls it a unit, the other a lot. One keeps a resolution as a line in the minutes, the other as a record with its own vote count. When a council moves from one to the other, someone retypes years of history by hand, or the council quietly loses it.

I keep running into this while building ManageStrata, and it isn't something we can fix inside our own product. So we're proposing something outside it, and asking everyone who builds for stratas to help shape it.

What OpenCOOS is

OpenCOOS is an open initiative that maintains COOS, the Common Ownership Operating Schema. COOS is a proposal, written down as a working draft, for what a strata corporation's records are, in plain language and as machine-readable JSON Schemas: a strata lot, a council member, a general meeting, a resolution, a levy, a work order, an insurance policy. Any software can read those definitions and map its own data to them.

The first working draft covers six areas:

• the corporation itself: its plan, buildings, lots, owners and common property
• governance: council, meetings, resolutions, votes and bylaws
• finances: funds, budgets, levies and transactions
• maintenance: common assets, repair requests and work orders
• documents and records
• compliance, starting with the insurance policy

Every definition comes with an example, and each time the draft changes, the examples are checked against the schemas automatically.

Why it matters beyond strata software

A strata's records don't stay in its management software. They're sent out all the time, and today almost every trip is a PDF, a spreadsheet or an email that someone retypes at the other end. Shared definitions help everyone a strata deals with:

• Contractors and their apps. A repair request becomes a work order, the work order goes to a plumber or a roofer, and the result comes back by phone. When a request, a work order and the asset it's about all mean the same thing in both systems, the job and its status can travel between them.
• Banks, lenders and insurers. A lender reviewing a mortgage, or an insurer pricing a renewal, asks for the same things every year: the budget, the contingency reserve balance, the insurance limits and deductibles. In a shared format, those can be asked for once and read the same way by everyone. COOS leaves out bank account numbers and payment details on purpose.
• Lawyers, notaries and realtors. When a lot sells, the buyer's side asks for the bylaws, recent minutes, levies and insurance. Records that follow the same structure are quicker to put together and easier to check.
• Accountants. Funds, budgets and transactions can be compared across stratas without assuming everyone uses the same accounting package or chart of accounts.
• Government and compliance. Strata plans and bylaw amendments are filed with the Land Title Office, and rules about what a strata must report keep changing. Records that already share a structure can be reported, and insurance renewals tracked, without building a new spreadsheet each time. COOS records the facts. Whether a strata complies is still up to people and the law.

None of these connections exist yet. They only become possible if the people who build those systems agree on the same definitions. That's why this is a proposal to the whole industry, and not one company's file format.

Why it's open, and why it isn't ours

A standard owned by one company is just that company's file format. COOS is published under the Apache 2.0 licence, so anyone can use it, build on it or argue with it, free. Changes are proposed and discussed in public on GitHub, and the people who maintain it commit to acting for the standard as a whole, not for any one product. That includes ours.

ManageStrata started OpenCOOS, and the site says so. We plan to build our own data model on it, and SearchStrata plans to adopt it too. Neither of us conforms to it yet, because there's nothing stable to conform to.

Where it stands

COOS is at version 0.1.0, a working draft. Nothing in it is stable yet, and any definition can change. That's deliberate. Now is when the definitions are cheapest to get right, and the best time for the people who'll use them to have a say.

It starts with BC strata corporations, because that's what we know best. Open proposals already cover condominium corporations in Ontario and Alberta, and whether names like "StrataLot" should become neutral ones that each province labels in its own words.

An invitation to solution providers

If you build software or services for stratas and condos, we'd like you involved now, while COOS is still a draft. That includes management platforms, accounting and banking, maintenance and trades apps, insurance, legal and conveyancing tools, and reserve planning and analytics. A standard written by one company will fit that company. One written with you will fit the industry.

Here's what joining looks like:

• Map your data to the draft. Pick one record you already keep, such as a strata lot, a work order or a levy, and see where it fits and where it doesn't. Open an issue for each gap.
• Propose what your product needs. Missing fields, vocabulary values, even a whole new entity. Bigger changes start as a written proposal, discussed in public, and the decision and the reasons for it are recorded.
• Tell us if you plan to implement it. Planned implementations are listed on opencoos.org, so councils and managers can see who's working toward the same standard.
• Help maintain it. Maintainers act for the standard as a whole, not for their employer, and say who they work for. We don't want ManageStrata to be the only company doing that work.

Say who you work for when you propose a change, as we do. It keeps the discussion honest.

You don't have to build software to take part. Councils and managers can check the definitions against how their strata actually works. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, insurers and appraisers can review the terms used in their province, and tell us which records they're always asking stratas for.

Start at opencoos.org/contribute, or join the conversation in the GitHub discussions.

A strata's record should belong to the corporation, whichever software it happens to use this year. A common language is how that becomes true in practice, and not just a promise one company makes.

— Efren