The FAIR Project has published its 2026 roadmap, outlining three major milestones scheduled for April, August, and December that focus on strengthening trust systems, expanding federated packages, and improving platform resilience and efficiency across its ecosystem.
Developing FAIR Trust Systems
The first milestone, targeted for April 26, centers on establishing its Trust Systems, with development work underway on FAIR Forge tools designed to support package labeling and provide trust-related data to a scoring mechanism.
Alongside this, FAIR plans to start re-packaging several widely used WordPress.org plugins to comply with the FAIR Protocol, adding extended metadata and cryptographic signing in the process.
The team also intends to introduce Forge tooling that generates individual metadata files for each federated package as stated, “ Forge tools will be developed to create a separate metadata document for each federated package, and present it as a human-readable document for review by FAIR and by the package’s maintainers.”
Additional work during this phase includes restructuring FAIR Beacon to make installation easier and to introduce improvements aimed at developers. Also, AspireCloud is expected to begin collecting anonymized usage data later in the year as highlighted, “AspireCloud will begin logging anonymized analytics data to make it available through an API endpoint for FAIR’s analytics aggregator when work on it begins later in the year.”
FAIR said its approach will “balance openness and privacy,” emphasizing that analytics will not be stored in a personally identifiable form, adding, “if we can’t share it publicly, we won’t store it privately.”
Two FAIR Connect updates are planned for this milestone, with versions 1.3 and 1.4 expected in February and April.
Federated Packages Set to Expand
The second milestone, scheduled for August 16, 2026, will focus on increasing the number of federated packages indexed by AspireCloud.
For plugins hosted on WordPress.org, FAIR will introduce a simplified migration path that “inherits trust from the WordPress.org review process,” allowing packages to be indexed using the FAIR Protocol rather than mirrored from the repository. Developers distributing plugins via GitHub or other sites will also have a clear process for submitting their work.
Collaboration with commercial software publishers to create secure API connections for license checks and payment processing is also planned, “ To support further expansion, FAIR will engage directly with commercial software publishers to assess needs and devise robust solutions for authenticated API endpoints to enable payment gateways and license key validation prior to installing or updating their packages. “
Also, FAIR’s Trust Labeller will gain the ability to restrict or block package installations based on labels. Meanwhile, the organization will begin combining data from multiple sources to provide maintainers with more accurate statistics through their Beacon dashboards.
Preparing the Platform for Scale
FAIR is preparing infrastructure upgrades with enhancements expected by December 6, 2026. The project said “network resilience will be improved throughout the year,” using this milestone to review and refine prior improvements.
With more plugins moving to the FAIR Protocol rather than relying on WordPress.org mirrors or standalone sources, the organization expects its internal systems for Forge processing, Trust Scoring, and Labelling to be stretched. FAIR added that this growth is likely to “drive a significant increase in the need for contributors,” making recruitment a key priority alongside scaling resources.
In this phase, Forge tooling will be improved with new trust signals, such as repository health indicators and potential support for verifiable credentials. Security checks will be strengthened for widely used plugins, and re-bundling and vetting efforts will expand to include the top 5,000–10,000 legacy WordPress packages.
FAIR also outlined several goals for 2026 that are not yet assigned to any milestones. This includes plans to introduce alerts for changes to package identifiers or download links, announcing its board and committee members, launching its branding, refining the Trust Scoring system, and publishing ongoing documentation updates. The team also published their 2025 recap.