Open Standard · v0.1 · BASICS Conformant

Records that travel.
Work that endures.

The Workpads Standard defines a portable, sovereign record format for commercial work — a job, a quote, an invoice — that travels as a URL over SMS, WhatsApp, or QR code. No server. No account. The record is the message.

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A record for the world that works

Hundreds of millions of people — market traders in Lagos, electricians in Louisville, delivery riders in Manila — run real businesses without cloud accounts, data plans, or smartphones. They do their work on paper, in memory, over voice calls.

The Workpads Standard was built for them.

A workpad record is complete enough to stand alone, compact enough to travel as a URL, honest about its state, and sovereign to its creator.

Transmission over any channel

A workpad record encodes an entire business transaction — service description, parties, status, financial terms — into a URL hash fragment. That URL travels over SMS, WhatsApp, QR code, or any link channel. No server receives it. No account holds it.

This is a deliberate design. The format runs on a KaiOS feature phone selling for $25, not just a connected smartphone. Encoding is designed to be compact under real mobile data constraints: sparse field packing, binary encoding, no JSON bloat. The spec targets the network conditions that exist, not those we wish existed.

An open door, not a protected territory

Babb created this standard to grow a format that serves workers — not to own a market. The standard is open. Anyone may implement it, extend it, and build proprietary or open-source products on it without permission.

What the standard asks in return is simple: interoperability. If your product generates workpad URLs, encode records any conformant decoder can read. If your product decodes them, implement §5 faithfully.

Babb builds reference implementations — KaiOS, web, CLI — to prove the standard works in practice and to establish a conformance baseline. These are proofs of concept with a conformance record. They are not the only valid implementations.

The standard grows through real implementation experience. Deviations found in practice feed the next version. Every conformant product makes the ecosystem stronger.

The Standard at a Glance

Eight numbered sections form the normative core. Each is versioned independently.

§1
PADS Data Model
The structure of a workpad record — fields, types, and the atomic record vocabulary.
§2
Record Schema (svc-basic)
Canonical field definitions for the basic service record type.
§3
Naming Convention
How records, fields, and implementations are named across the ecosystem.
§4
RecordService Interface
The programmatic surface for creating, reading, and updating workpad records.
§5
Codec & Compact Encoding
The binary encoding that produces a URL-safe hash fragment. The interoperability core.
§6
Storage Adapter Contract
The interface between record logic and platform storage (IndexedDB, file, memory).
§7
Two-Build Strategy
How a single codebase targets both KaiOS feature phones and modern web platforms.
§8
BASICS Conformance
The mapping from Workpads Standard v0.1 to BASICS Core tier requirements.

Join the Ecosystem

The standard grows through real implementation experience. Build on it, extend it through registered deviations, or contribute observations back through GitHub. Formal BASICS conformance is not required to implement Workpads — but it signals a documented interoperability posture to other implementors.

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