API Evangelist is really interested in elevating the API governance rule conversation, bringing more visibility and discussion to specific rules, and why you would want to apply and enforce a rule and why you wouldn’t. After the conversation with Dave Shanley of Vacuum (and rock star) fame, and their comment about a governance rule marketplace, we were left us thinking more deeply about what this might look like. A Spectral and Vacuum rule marketplace could have the following elements to help make rules more discoverable, but also increase the awareness and usage of both Spectral and Vacuum, as well as standardizing how companies approach the governance of their APIs.
- Discovery - Ability to search and browse for API governance rules by name, message, description, and other metadata.
- Guidance - Supporting content, artifacts, and media to support each rule to help people understand how they can apply.
- Discussion - Enabling discussions around individual rules, as well as across rules, bringing the much needed human learning.
- Collaboration - Startups and enterprises could work together to create rulesets and improve upon rulesets in the marketplace.
- Provenance - Providing the research, discussions, and history behind each rule, as well as which API companies are using.
- Standards - Push the offering of rulesets that support the Internet, industry, and other types of standards we need for our APIs.
This is just an initial list of what an API governance rule marketplace could look like. It would act like a schema registry for the YAML and JSON rules, but it would also bring much more of the human aspect of API governance and enablement required to make an actual impact. API producers could find the rules, but also the guidance, discussion, collaboration, and research, standards, and backing they need to make the argument back in their enterprise for why a rule should be applied as part of governance. Without an API marketplace the work to elevate, standardize, and socialize API governance rules is going to take a lot more isolated work, and is something we all should be doing out in the open together.
