In this tender the lot “Onboarding & Accreditation Workflows” (OAW) is being awarded. The purpose of the service functions to be implemented is to safeguard that all participants and offerings within the Gaia-X ecosystem are subject to a validation process before entering the Federated Catalogue (the Federated Catalogue is being awarded in a separate tender).

Basis for the assessment of compliance for Release 1 is the minimum viable set (MVS) of policy rules developed in the Gaia-X Policy Rules Committee and approved by the Board of Directors of the Gaia-X AISBL. Those are based on accepted standards and established conformity assessment tools ensuring that the additional effort for the provider to enter Gaia-X is kept at a minimum.

Upon successful completion of the validation process Verifiable Credentials (vCs) will be issued representing the assurance levels of the service offering and registered in the Gaia-X Federated Catalogue. Those VCs can be used to automatically indicate the compliance level across different federations.
Part of the OAW is the documentation of the validation process and the generation of an audit trail to guarantee adherence to generally accepted practices in conformity assessment.

The OAW comprises furthermore special elements for:

  • Monitoring of the compliance relevant basis (e.g., expiration dates of certificates)
  • Update of the data of the service offering (the provider has the obligation to put forward substantial changes to the offering for compliance checks
  • Suspension of offerings (e.g., in case of pending investigations of possible infractions)
  • Revocation of offerings (e.g., in case of proven infractions)

The OAW will be designed in a way that it can be used by different accredited stakeholders in different federations. Furthermore, it will enable Federations to add e.g., domain-specific compliance criteria to the “common core”.