API Evangelist

API Evangelist has studied the business, politics and technology of APIs since 2010. Most of that work happens in the open, and this collective is how we fund the parts that belong to everyone.

Open standards. We take part in the specification work the API economy runs on. We sit in on the OpenAPI, Arazzo and Overlays calls each week, along with AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, MCP and A2A, and write up what we learn so the people building on these specifications can follow along. We maintain APIs.json, a machine-readable index for describing an API provider's APIs and the artifacts around them. And we keep a public standards catalog at standards.apievangelist.com that tracks hundreds of specifications, formats and protocols, and who implements them.

API Commons. API Commons publishes profiles of the standards nobody ratified, like the OpenAI interface, S3 and CKAN. Each profile is measured operation by operation against what the industry actually built. Every profile generates its own OpenAPI, Overlay, Arazzo workflow, MCP tools and Spectral ruleset, and the commons also maintains shared example APIs that tool builders can test against.

OpenLint. We helped start OpenLint, the community continuation of the Spectral API linter. It is turning the ruleset format into a formal, testable specification with conformance tests, so the thousands of existing API style guides stay valid and portable across tools.

Open data. Through APIs.io we profile more than 31,000 API providers. We publish the contracts, schemas, rulesets and other artifacts we gather in public repositories, and we publish the Kin Score rubric we use to measure them, method and all. Artifacts are licensed CC BY-NC-SA and code is Apache 2.0.

Why fund it. Specifications, catalogs and shared tooling are maintained by small groups of people, often on volunteer time. Funding here pays for the hours that keep this work current: measuring adoption, maintaining examples and profiles, writing it all up, and showing up to the calls where the standards get decided. Every contribution and expense is visible on this page.