COSTA.
Get involved

Help build the standard.

COSTA only works if the industry shapes it together. There are four useful ways to contribute, whether you write code, run a producer, or regulate the market.

For developers

Open issues and pull requests

The specification lives on GitHub. File an issue when something is unclear, ambiguous, or missing. Submit a PR with a proposed change. All discussion is public.

For producers

Adopt and tell us

Implement COSTA on your product catalog, then email the URL. We will list you as an adopter, notify aggregators, and use your real-world implementation to inform the next version.

For marketplaces & tech

Consume COSTA feeds

If you operate a dispensary, marketplace, aggregator, or shopping tool, build a COSTA reader. Reading the spec is straightforward; the JSON-LD is standard schema.org.

For regulators

Give us regulatory feedback

If you work for a provincial wholesale board, Health Canada, or an international cannabis regulator, we want to make sure COSTA aligns cleanly with reporting requirements. Email us directly.

How decisions get made

Every change to the spec is proposed in the open on GitHub. The process is intentionally lightweight:

  1. An issue is filed describing the problem or proposed addition.
  2. Discussion happens in the thread. Adopters, maintainers, and the broader community weigh in.
  3. If there is rough consensus, a pull request is opened with the concrete change.
  4. The maintainers merge once the PR is reviewed and aligned with the principles in the about page.

Backwards-incompatible changes wait for a major version (v2.0). Additive changes — new optional fields, new enum values — ship in minor versions (v1.1, v1.2). The version field on every payload makes it unambiguous which revision of the spec your data targets.

Contact

For anything that does not belong on a public GitHub issue — partnership conversations, regulatory coordination, press — email hello@gocosta.org.

Roadmap candidates

Active areas of work for v1.1 and beyond:

  • U.S. state regulatory variants (California METRC, Colorado MED, Washington WSLCB).
  • Batch-level traceability and harvest data.
  • Consumer reviews as structured data.
  • Medical cannabis certifications and therapeutic-use fields.
  • Reference validators in JavaScript and Python, published as packages.

If any of these matters to you, file an issue or open a draft PR. The roadmap moves at the speed of contributors.