Active Agenda is an open source software project open to risk management professionals and technologists from around the globe. Active Agenda is a collaborative, browser based, software product created to assist global enterprises to reduce operational risk and losses associated with the performance of work. The Active Agenda project is open to interested participants and is managed by the founders of Active Agenda, Inc

Active Agenda development began ten years ago as an attempt to launch a proprietary product into the territorial and market controlled environment of the insurance and risk management industry. Original efforts to develop Active Agenda as a proprietary product were met with a multitude of investment, market, and development controls.

In September of 2003, the founders of Active Agenda, Inc. began to aggressively research the open source movement and its underlying philosophies. The founders rapidly recognized the basic tenants of open source development projects as a possible solution for building and distributing innovation within an industry controlled by a few companies that thrive on the absence of innovation. Later the same year, the founders of Active Agenda decided to rebuild the Active Agenda product from the ground up, using international standards and open source technologies, with open sourcing the project in mind from the beginning.

At project launch, Active Agenda’s founders had crafted more than fifty operational risk control modules to act as the initial platform for product evolution. We designed each module using an XML Schema designed "in-house." The resulting XML specifications contain all of the components necessary to generate a database driven Web application. Each XML specification file consists of the database table structure, screen layouts, field phrases, and a documentation section. The XML file specifications are parsed using an internally developed PHP parser that converts the XML files into a PHP application atop a MySQL database.

Our process, which we refer to as "spec2app," is a scalable development method that is optimal for projects involving modular and highly customizable designs. Our method allows Active Agenda to be adapted to any operating platform atop any database. Active Agenda chose XML for this purpose and we welcome interested participants to help us extend our domain and technical design, our international deployment, and extensions to other platforms and operating systems.