An open standard for the audience data behind culture and sport

A venue, a festival, an artist or a club creates the relationship with its audience. Yet the record of that audience tends to live across ticketing platforms, access-control vendors, webshops and membership tools, each holding a slice in its own shape. None of them was designed to hand that slice to the next system cleanly.

The friction is not really about the schema. It is about the connectors: the code that reads one platform's API and reshapes it for another. APIs change every quarter, and a connector has to be kept alive forever. That is where the time and the money go.

Think of it as four layers. The protocol and the runtime underneath are meant to be shared infrastructure, open and free to anyone. The activation tools and the value work on top are where products and businesses differentiate.

At heart OAP is event-native. The Signal is the unifying shape, so whether data arrives by a poll or by a push, everything normalises to the same entities. Pull is simply how you source events from a platform that does not push; push is events arriving directly.

The shift is that connectors are built and kept current once, in a shared, governed commons, instead of being rebuilt by every consumer that needs the same source. Write to the standard one time, and the whole sector reuses it.

On request from the organisation that owns the data, an OAP-compliant system must produce a complete export: every profile, event, offer, ticket and signal it holds for that organisation, in canonical OAP, including consent and any known extensions. It must also be able to import an export in the same shape.

That one guarantee is the mechanical meaning of "your data is yours." It is also the clean-onboarding path, since the same export doubles as the initial backfill: load it once, then stay live.

Each certified platform has one record carrying everything a developer or an agent needs to set up a connection in a single lookup: the endpoints, the auth method, the OAP version spoken, the bindings supported, the entities and signals supplied, the mapping used, and a live certified status.

The registry and certification are one mechanism. A platform enters the registry only once it is certified, and it stays certified only while automated conformance checks against its live endpoint keep passing: current OAP, valid required entities over the mandatory bindings, and a working portability export.

Access tells an agent how to reach a source. Meaning is the canonical schema, so it learns the concept of a ticket once rather than per platform. Translation is the connector or mapping. Discovery is the registry, which is the corner that was missing and the one that makes the rest operational.

Standardised meaning is the precondition for self-service. And because OAP is a stable target language, an agent can go a step further and generate or repair the connector itself, which is the mechanism that finally collapses the cost of integration.

Each archetype below reuses the same model. Watch how little has to change to move from a single room with a ticket calendar to continuous access with no dated performance at all. Whatever you run, it almost certainly maps to one of these four shapes.

When everyone has the same protocol and the same runtime, having them is no advantage. Using them well becomes the only difference that lasts. Organisations in culture and sport are often short on data skill but rich in shared problems, so the scarce thing moves from the technology to the know-how. Technology gets cheaper every year; domain know-how does not.

The benchmark layer is the part a competitor cannot copy. Anyone can fork the runtime or clone a module, but no one can recreate the aggregated, consent-covered picture of hundreds of organisations, because it only exists at scale. Opening up the lower layers is what produces that scale. More organisations on open OAP means richer benchmarks, which makes the guidance more useful, which draws more organisations in.

Two entities exist from the start. A neutral steward, an open project that becomes a foundation in time, owns the specification, the reference schema and the reference runtime under a permissive licence. A separate company owns the value layer, the certification marks and any proprietary modules.

Neutrality is not rushed. A standard is donated to a foundation once it is already the default, not before. The moment to press that button is when a large adopter's participation depends on it.