Accord Project (AP) Technical Steering Committee and maintainers wrapped up two days of intensive planning meetings for 2025, and are excited to announce Accord Project Agent Interface (APAI).
Accord Project Agent Interface defines how human or computer agents can use Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to create, read, update and query Accord Project templates and agreements. Look out for more details soon on an open-source framework for agentic agreement management!
Thank you Docusign for hosting the meetings in their beautiful Dublin waterfront offices and to all attendees for their contributions.
Attendees
Technical Steering Committee:
Matt Roberts (Docusign, TSC chair), Dan Selman (Meta, TSC), Diana Lease (Docusign, TSC, Chair Technology Working Group), Martin Halford (BeNext, TSC), Jonathan Casey (Docusign, TSC), Tom Brooke (Brooke and Brooke LLC, TSC), Niall Roche (The Building Blocks, TSC).
Maintainers:
Muhamed Abdulkadir (Docusign, maintainer), Ertgurul Karademir (Docusign, maintainer), Jamie Shorten (Docusign, maintainer), Sanket Shevkar (Docusign, maintainer).
Contributors:
Tim Tavarez (Decombine, contributor), Shweta Arya (Docusign, contributor), Dibyam Agrawal (Docusign, contributor), Santanu Roy (Docusign, contributor), Nitin Kumar Sharma (Docusign, contributor), Saurav Gupta (Docusign, contributor), Deepak Vishwakarma (Docusign, contributor),
State of the Community
Matt Roberts opened the conference with a review of the community’s health and status. A full recording of this session is available on Vimeo.
The session highlighted consistent contributions over the past two years, with the community reaching an all-time milestone of 18,000 contributions and 580 unique contributors. We also celebrated the success of 12 former GSoC contributors, including Eason and Sanket, who have pursued successful careers in the industry.
A review of open challenges demonstrated the community’s resilience through transitions with major sponsors (IBM, Clause, Docusign) and progress in moving from Ergo to a more general-purpose representation of contract logic.
Highlights from 2024 included renewed engagement with GSoC, participation in the GSoC Mentors Summit, and the publication of the first edition of our whitepaper, “An Introduction to Computable Contracts”.
Commercial Adoption
Jonathan Casey and Tim Tavarez discussed their progress, future plans, and community contributions regarding the use of Accord Project tools within their respective businesses, Docusign and Decombine.
At Docusign, Concerto powers the IAM platform. Jonathan emphasized how modeling unlocks valuable insights about agreements, enhances reporting capabilities, and supports system interoperability between Docusign and third-party systems of record, resulting in a more robust, reliable, and integrated agreement lifecycle for millions of users worldwide.
Tim gave a demonstration of the Decombine Network, and discussed to opportunity for automation of agreements as state machines.
Google Summer of Code
This year, we received almost 200 proposals for Accord Project projects under the Google Summer of Code program, demonstrating significant interest and high-quality applications.
At the conference, mentors began the initial screening of applications, grouping proposals by project ideas. The Template Playground has emerged as a popular area of interest, particularly regarding AI integration and migration to Tailwind CSS. We’re grateful to David Okononfua for his contributions to Template Playground in GSoC 2024 which laid the foundation for new projects this year.
Figure 1 – Breakdown of the GSoC 2025 applications by project.
Replacing Ergo with TypeScript
We ran a hands-on session where we created some new templates and migrated some of the existing templates to use the new Template Engine with template archives that contain TypeScript logic. A demo template archive is available on GitHub.
Repository status: invest, maintain or deprecate
The team also spent time reviewing the existing AP technology stack and repositories and discussed their maintenance status. The team concluded that we need more focus on a smaller set of core repositories, while peripheral repositories with low maintainer/contributor participation will be deprecated and moved to the archive status. The conclusions are documented in the Repository Status Wiki.
What’s next?
Looking ahead, we are excited to share a renewed vision for the Accord Project, prioritizing developers and users in the legal tech space. Key upcoming changes include a new contract logic engine to replace Ergo, supporting multiple programming languages for increased flexibility. We are also developing the Accord Project Agent Interface to streamline the integration of smart legal contracts into workflows. Our focus includes community building, improving onboarding through a clear “happy path,” and refining core functionality, documentation, and GitHub repositories to enhance accessibility and impact.