OCAS v0.1.0 — initial draft release

[MHWing]

First project published under The Foundation — a home for open standards, protocols and shared infrastructure for socially-beneficial software.

OCAS (the Open Charity API Standard) is a vendor-neutral OpenAPI 3.1 specification any charity can adopt to expose donations, subscriptions, campaigns, receipts and tax-relief declarations in a standard shape.

What's included

Core spec

• OpenAPI 3.1 specification covering 22 endpoints across 40 schemas
• Three discoverable authentication modes: public, api_key, oauth2 (with PKCE)
• Idempotency-Key header support on donation and subscription creation
• HMAC-SHA256 webhook signing with OCAS-Signature header and 5-minute replay window
• Money represented as integer minor units throughout

Tax-relief schemes (10 international)

Polymorphic tax_relief_declarations[] with discriminator-based support for:
UK Gift Aid · US 501(c)(3) · Canadian CRA · Australian DGR · Irish CHY · German Spendenbescheinigung · French réduction d'impôt · Dutch ANBI · Singaporean IPC · Malaysian §44(6)

Islamic giving (first-class)

• zakat with the 8 canonical Asnaf categories from Qur'an 9:60
• sadaqah, sadaqah_jariyah, waqf, lillah, fidya, kaffarah
• qurbani / udhiyyah with full animal-share metadata
• aqiqah with birth-celebration metadata
• interest_purification (explicitly disallowed as Zakat)
• Optional /zakat/calculator endpoint for Nisab values

Developer experience

• Postman collection with worked examples (Gift Aid, Zakat with Asnaf, Qurbani, refunds, daily Ramadan subscription)
• READMEs translated into Arabic, Urdu, French, Spanish, Turkish, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu
• Six example JSON payloads under examples/
• CI validates spec, examples, and Postman collection on every PR

Known limitations

• Draft status — breaking changes possible until v1.0.0
• No reference implementation yet (planned for v0.2)
• DAFs, stocks/crypto-specific flows, legacies, in-kind donations, and grant disbursement are intentionally out of scope for v0.1
• Country profiles beyond the 10 listed schemes will be added via PR as adopters need them

Get involved

• Adopt the spec and tell us what broke - open a Discussion
• Add a country profile - see the country-profile issue template
• Propose an RFC - see the RFC issue template
• Translate the README into your language - see docs/i18n/

Apache 2.0 licensed. Vendor-neutral. Self-hostable. No proselytising in any direction.

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This discussion was created from the release OCAS v0.1.0 — initial draft release.