Working draft · version 0.1 · started September 2026
An open, vendor-neutral specification for measuring Digital Employee Experience.
OpenDEX defines a shared taxonomy, precise metric definitions and a machine-readable schema for DEX — so telemetry produced by different tools can be described, exchanged and, eventually, benchmarked consistently, instead of every team inventing its own definition of "login time." It's a specification project, not a product, and it's still a working draft.
Scope
Stated twice: once as ambition, once as restraint.
It is deliberately not another DEX product, a DEX score owned by one company, a ranking of vendors, a replacement for platforms like Nexthink or Lakeside, a consulting framework, or — at this stage — a benchmarking company.
A standard that only one vendor controls isn't a standard anyone should trust.
From the original OpenDEX proposal
Positioning
Vendor-neutral thinking about DEX is emerging from more than one direction. Most of it lives one layer up from OpenDEX: it asks how an organization should run a DEX practice — people, process, technology. That's a real question. It isn't this one.
Different problems, better solved together: an operating model can tell a team how to run DEX; it still needs a shared way to say what login time or packet loss actually means.
Architecture
No maturity model, no RACI, no instructions on how to staff a team. Just four layers, in order.
Taxonomy. What things count as DEX in the first place — a shared vocabulary across device, application, network, collaboration, security and sentiment.
Metric definitions. What each measurement precisely means: unit, start event, end event, exclusions, aggregation, sampling.
Data schema. How a measurement is represented on the wire, so it moves between systems without a hand-written translation layer.
{
"metric": "device.login_time",
"value": 14.2,
"unit": "seconds",
"timestamp": "2026-09-01T09:14:02Z",
"device": "anon-device-id",
"os": "Windows 11"
}
Interoperability. Can two unrelated DEX platforms produce data a third system can consume without custom mapping? That's the real test.
Taxonomy v0.1
Roughly thirty to fifty metrics across six categories — not five hundred. A usable starting vocabulary matters more than early completeness.
No universal "OpenDEX score" is defined at this stage, on purpose — collapsing this into one number is the fragmentation problem the specification exists to avoid solving too early.
Charter v0.1
Year one
Built to hold its shape regardless of how quickly vendors, practitioners or data show up — each movement works either way.
Publish the OpenDEX Charter v0.1 and an initial governance draft. Stand up the specification repository. Draft the first taxonomy. Begin a biweekly Working Note documenting open questions in public.
Recruit five to ten Founding Contributors. Open four working groups. Run the first OpenDEX Roundtable and publish what came out of it.
Ship a small reference collector. Run an interoperability challenge across independent and synthetic data sources. Launch a small benchmark pilot and publish distributions, never company-level scores.
Publish OpenDEX v0.9 with taxonomy, schema, reference implementation and governance in place. Form a Technical Council with no single-company majority. Release OpenDEX v1.0.
Target: OpenDEX 1.0, by the end of August 2027.
Get involved
OpenDEX begins with a small founding group, not a follower count. The measure of a good first year is the number of independent people who materially shaped the specification.
New practitioners join with a defined sixty-to-ninety-day charter, not an immediate title: recruit a handful of peers, run practitioner interviews, review the taxonomy, produce real use cases, help host a roundtable. Strong contribution in that window is how leadership roles get decided.
SIG 1Measurement — what should be measured, and why.
SIG 2Schema — how a measurement gets represented.
SIG 3Benchmarking — how organizations can be compared safely.
SIG 4Practitioner Experience — what DEX means operationally, day to day.
Every two weeks, a short Working Note takes up one open question — instead of a polished announcement — so the paper trail of an unfinished specification stays honest and visible.
Governance & IP
OpenDEX has no founders and no equity. All early participants share the same standing: contributor. "Founding contributor" describes when you joined, never what you own.
Participation is by standing, never by stake. No one joins as an owner, because there is nothing to own.
No shares, no paid seats, no ROI. The only contribution currency is skill and name.
Proposed by Anakage, then deliberately handed to independent, community-run governance.
OpenDEX began as a proposal published by Anakage and is deliberately moving toward independent, community-run governance — see the roadmap above. Anakage neither owns the specification nor controls its future: a contribution to OpenDEX is a contribution to the community's shared language, not to any company's product.
No interest category, single company, or individual gets a deciding vote by default — and no platform can retrospectively own the standard it helped write.
From the original OpenDEX proposal
You join as yourself. Your employer gains nothing they didn't already have the right to: contributing doesn't transfer ownership of your employer's IP, doesn't give Company A a seat at a special table, and doesn't let the specification become a spec-for-hire. What it does is put your name on a public record of work that the whole community can build on.
In other words: a contributor's capital is their skill and their name — never a claim on the project.
Open, model legal terms OpenDEX plans to adopt at v0.1, quoted verbatim so the intent is unambiguous. Both instruments were designed for exactly this position — shared standards that no single company can quietly own.
The development process shall not be dominated by any single interest category, individual or organization. Dominance means a position or exercise of dominant authority, leadership, or influence by reason of superior leverage, strength, or representation to the exclusion of fair and equitable consideration of other viewpoints.
Participation shall be open to all persons who are directly and materially affected by the activity in question. There shall be no undue financial barriers to participation.
Contributor grants Licensee a non-sublicensable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as expressly stated in this License) license to its Necessary Claims included the Approved Specification that are within Scope for Licensee's Implementation of the Approved Specification, except for those patent claims Contributor excludes by a written notice ...
I represent that I am legally entitled to make the grants set forth in the documents above. If my employer(s) has rights to intellectual property that may be infringed by the materials developed by this Working Group, I represent that I have received permission to enter these agreements on behalf of that employer.
I understand and agree that this project and the contribution are public and that a record of the contribution (including all personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with this project or the open source license(s) involved.
Quoted from the model documents above; OpenDEX will adopt its own versions at v0.1. This page is not legal advice — Governance and IP docs are a draft item on the year-one roadmap.
Source
The next artifact being built, deliberately after the charter and first taxonomy draft are solid rather than before.
The repository will hold the taxonomy, schema, examples, a reference implementation, and the governance documents below. It goes live with the v0.1 release, with issues and pull requests open from day one.
specification/ · examples/ · reference-implementation/ · governance/ · CONTRIBUTING.md · GOVERNANCE.md
This button will link straight to it once it's public. For now, the fastest way in is the contributor track below.
Join
Practitioners, engineers, researchers and vendor-side people are all useful here — especially anyone willing to argue with a metric definition.
Tell us what you measure today, what you don't trust, and what you wish a specification like this got right. That's the whole application.
join@opendex.dev is a placeholder — point it at a real, monitored inbox before this page goes live.