ECS Proposal Stages

These are the stages that an individual RFC advances through before being released for general availability in the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). See the Contributing Guide for broader details about contributing changes to ECS through the RFC process.

	Stage	Goals during this stage	Criteria for consideration for this stage	Acceptance into this stage signifies	Acceptable changes to schema in this stage	Breaking changes expected after acceptance into this stage	Recommended types of usage implementation
0	Strawperson	Discuss with domain or subject matter experts the utility of these changes Discuss with ECS team whether these changes seem appropriate for ECS	Opened RFC pull request for this strawperson at elastic/ecs	The premise of these changes is not obviously useless or inappropriate for ECS	None	Major	N/A
1	Proposal	Make the case for these changes Describe the field definitions at a high level Identify potential challenges and areas that need more clarity	Opened pull request for this proposal revising the existing strawperson Identified "sponsor" at Elastic who will participate in RFC process and take ownership of the change after the process completes Types of fields or changes outlined High-level description of examples of usage High-level description of example sources of data Identified potential concerns and implementation challenges/complexity Subject matter experts identified and weighed in on the high level utility of these changes in the pull request ECS team weighed in on appropriateness of these changes in the pull request	ECS team accepts the premise of the addition and commits to considering this proposal as it advances.	None	Major	Proof of concepts, demos
2	Draft	Identify a comprehensive set of field definitions that could be appropriate for real-world usage	Opened pull request for this draft revising the existing proposal Outlined initial field definitions Included a real world example source document Identifies scope of impact of changes to ingestion mechanisms (e.g. beats/logstash), usage mechanisms (e.g. Kibana applications, detections), and the ECS project (e.g. docs, tooling) Subject matter experts weighed in on technical utility of field definitions in the pull request	The initial field definitions are a comprehensive, though not necessarily complete, model of the addition to the schema. Fundamental questions and concerns are resolved, though some less significant questions remain open.	Draft field definitions can be committed to the ECS schema as "experimental" fields	Iterative	Experimental and beta features
3	Candidate	Indicate that direct experience from implementations and users is necessary to validate the additions	Opened pull request for this candidate revising the existing draft Completed field definitions Included multiple real world example source documents Existing or newly raised questions and concerns are addressed	There are no further open questions or unaddressed concerns, and the field definitions are complete based on the information and usage experience we have.	Candidate field definitions can be committed to the ECS schema as "beta" fields	Minimal: only those determined to be critical based on usage experience	GA features
4	Finished	Indicate that the addition is ready for GA release in ECS	Opened pull request for this candidate revising the existing candidate At least one real-world, production-ready usage implementation exists for the field definitions Existing or newly raised questions and concerns are addressed No objections from sponsor, ECS team, or subject matter experts	The field definitions are in use as defined in real-world, production-ready software without raising additional questions or concerns that need to be resolved. The changes are ready to be released as GA in ECS.	Field definitions can be committed to the ECS schema as "GA" fields	None outside major versions	Any