OKF directory & marketplace strategy¶
Decision-ready as of 2026-07-29. OKF was announced 2026-06-12; every number below is a snapshot of a seven-week-old ecosystem and will move fast. Claims are tagged [verified] (fetched from the cited source) or [inference] (our read). Where a source could not be reached from this environment, that is said explicitly.
Executive summary¶
Do not build a hosted bundle marketplace; ride GitHub as the registry and ship
the index. Outcrop should publish an index-of-bundles that is itself an OKF
bundle — curated in a public repo, consumed in-product through the existing
canvas (a query card and a graph card over the index), and installable via a new
outcrop install <owner/repo> command — so browsing the directory is using the
product. The ecosystem already has two community web directories, three
awesome-lists, and five-plus OKF MCP servers, but nobody validates OKF's trust
metadata (sources, generated, verified, stale_after); Outcrop is the only
tool positioned to make trust queryable (WHERE _trust_tier =
'human-reviewed' AND NOT _stale), and that is the differentiator to build the
community around. Distribution rides existing rails — the okf-bundle GitHub
topic (only 3 repos today; the namespace is unclaimed and we should write its
convention), MCP tools (install_bundle, search_bundles) into an
80k-server MCP distribution wave, and canvases/skills/themes that already
persist as records and therefore ship as bundles for free. Revisit this posture
only if Google ships an official registry (integrate it day one) or a community
directory reaches thousands of bundles with a stable API (consume it, don't
compete with it).
Part 1 — The OKF ecosystem as of July 2026¶
1.1 The spec and its owner¶
- Google Cloud announced OKF v0.1 on 2026-06-12 with reference
implementations (a BigQuery enrichment agent producer, a static HTML
visualizer consumer), three sample bundles (GA4, Stack Overflow, Bitcoin)
living in-repo at
okf/bundles/, and Knowledge Catalog ingestion. The announcement names no partners and no registry; governance is "file issues, send PRs" on GitHub. [verified] — announcement, okf/bundles GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog: ~8,000 stars, 664 forks, 88 open issues, 66 open PRs as of 2026-07-29. The README carries the disclaimer "not an official Google product." [verified] That is real momentum for seven weeks, and real governance ambiguity: the spec's home is a samples repo, not a standards org.- The spec moved fast already: v0.2 (which we vendor at
docs/okf/SPEC.md, fetched 2026-07-29 perdocs/okf/UPSTREAM) supersedes v0.1 with two breaking renames (timestamp→generated.at; body# Citations→sources) plus the trust/provenance/attestation families. Most third-party tooling surveyed below still targets v0.1. [verified against the vendored spec §13; v0.1 targeting observed in tool READMEs] - okf.md renders the spec and hosts an ecosystem tools page with producer/consumer categories. The site itself was unreachable from this environment (proxy 403), so its maintainer and listing process are unverified; its existence and structure are confirmed via search index.
1.2 Directories that already exist¶
| Directory | What we could verify | What we could not |
|---|---|---|
| BundleDex | Community registry claiming 240+ bundles; submission = "push to GitHub"; per-bundle pages; a "Using OKF bundles with Claude Code" guide; an okf get <name> fetch flow. [verified via search snippets] |
Site blocked from this environment (403). Owner, curation bar, traffic, and whether okf get is their own CLI — all unverified. |
| okfbundle.com | Public directory plus a hosted MCP endpoint (okfbundle.com/mcp/) — point Claude Desktop/Cursor at one URL to search and read bundles. [verified via search snippets] | Same: owner, count, curation unverified (403). |
| awesome-lists | Three independent awesome-okf lists: linyiru (published as a conformant OKF bundle — the dogfooding move already exists in the wild), McClawdDigital, yzfly (Chinese; Feishu/Obsidian/Notion/GitHub → OKF converters). [verified] | Relative reach. |
Nobody official: Google hosts sample bundles in the spec repo and explicitly did not ship a registry. The directory layer is entirely community, entirely young, and nothing has won. [verified]
1.3 Tooling adoption signals¶
- GitHub topic
okf: 178 repos. Top by stars:lineage-skill(378★, distills media into source-backed agent skills),okf-skills(180★, Claude Code plugin to author/validate/visualize bundles),echoes-vault-opencode(153★, OpenCode persistent memory),claude-mega-brain(122★, OKF context injection for Claude Code),okf-gem(112★, CLI:validate | lint | search | index | server | render, per-user@slugregistry in a plain JSON file, ships as a Claude Code plugin). [verified] - Topic
okf-bundle: 3 repos. The bundle-tagging namespace is effectively unclaimed. [verified] - MCP is the hottest OKF distribution surface: at least five independent
OKF MCP servers in seven weeks —
hdean-ssp/okf-mcp (BM25+vector search
over bundles), OKF Vault,
OKF Knowledge Agent
(
kb_query/kb_add/kb_updatetools), mfdaves/okf-mcp,concept-router, plus okfbundle.com's hosted endpoint. [verified] - Vendor support: secondary roundups (e.g. witscode) claim Ab Initio, Anomalo, Atlan, and Collibra announced OKF support; Google's own announcement names none. Treat as plausible but unverified. An Obsidian interop commit exists in the wild (obsidian-wiki OKF import/export); Obsidian needs no plugin to read a bundle — it is just a vault. [verified]
- HN: "Google proposes Open Knowledge Format based on Markdown". Thread unreachable from this environment; secondary coverage (iloveseo, webreactiva) reports the dominant objections were (a) no typed relationships between concepts and (b) "weird text format + git" is hostile to non-dev knowledge workers. Both objections are things Outcrop directly answers (graph table functions; a DBMS/canvas surface over the files). [objections verified via secondary sources; thread stats unverified]
Read on the field [inference]: the ecosystem is accreting through agent clients (Claude Code plugins, MCP servers, OpenCode memory), not through web directories. The two directories exist but neither has structural advantage; the awesome-lists show curation demand; the trust/provenance half of the spec — v0.2's entire reason to exist — is validated by no tool we found.
Part 2 — How ecosystems actually accrete users¶
Full survey in Appendix A. The mechanics that repeat:
- The client is the directory that wins. Obsidian's plugin list is a git
repo plus an in-app browser; Raycast's store is in-client; Hugging Face won
because
from_pretrained("name")was wired into the library everyone already used; Docker Hub won by being the client's default registry. Standalone web directories commoditize instantly — see the Claude-skills scrape-fest, where five sites each claim to be the largest (23k, 42k, 96k, 274k, 2.4M "skills") and none is trusted. - Publish friction must be ~zero, and the publisher keeps hosting. Homebrew taps, Go modules, Obsidian plugins, BundleDex's own "push to GitHub to submit": the registry that asks for an upload loses to the registry that asks for a URL. Hosting bytes is a cost center that later forces rate limits (Docker Hub's arc).
- First-party blessing sets the namespace even when it arrives late. The official MCP registry appeared after Smithery/Glama/PulseMCP had tens of thousands of listings (~81.8k deduplicated across five sources as of 2026-07-28 per mcptoplist) — and became the canonical metadata source the aggregators now consume.
- When counts inflate, trust becomes the scarce good. The MCP and skills ecosystems are both now differentiating on curation, signing, and provenance — after the fact. OKF v0.2 bakes the trust fields into the format itself; the ecosystem just hasn't operationalized them yet.
Part 3 — Strategy¶
3.1 Posture: ride GitHub as the registry, ship the index¶
Recommendation: community-first, first-party index. Outcrop does not host
bundles, does not run a marketplace website, and does not compete with
BundleDex on breadth. Outcrop publishes and curates outcrop-index — an
index of known-good OKF bundles that is itself a conformant OKF bundle in a
public repo:
- Each directory entry is a concept:
type: Bundle,resource: https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>,description,tags,sources(where we found it), and — the point —verifiedentries recording that Outcrop's validator ran clean against it, at what commit, by which actor (process:outcrop-index-ciorhuman:<curator>). - Curation is PR-based (the Obsidian model). CI on the index repo runs
outcrop validateagainst each listed bundle before merge. - Because the index is an OKF bundle, it is: consumable by every other OKF
tool (including the directories we're "competing" with — they can ingest
us), diffable, forkable if we ever misbehave, and — decisively — queryable
in Outcrop itself. The in-product bundle browser is not new UI; it is a
canvas with a query card and a graph card pointed at the index bundle
(per
docs/CANVAS.md: cards are queries, the canvas is a record). Browsing the directory is a live demo of the product. Dogfooding is the moat.
What Outcrop builds:
outcrop install <owner/repo>[/path][@rev]— fetch a bundle from GitHub (or any git URL/tarball) into a folder of the store, through the normal transaction path: staged, validated per folder policy, committed with History. Install provenance is recorded in OKF's own vocabulary — asourcesentry on the imported records' folder metadata pointing at origin repo + commit. Uninstall = Restore.outcrop publish— validate + lint + generateindex.md+ tag the repookf-bundle+ open a PR againstoutcrop-index. A helper, not a gate: publishing is pushing to GitHub.- MCP tools
search_bundlesandinstall_bundleon the existingoutcrop-serverMCP surface — so any agent in any MCP client can pull knowledge into a store mid-session. This rides the largest distribution wave in the agent ecosystem at zero marginal cost. - Trust made queryable — computed columns in
outcrop-query:_trust_tier(unverified | machine-confirmed | human-reviewed, derived per spec §5.3),_stale(today >= stale_after, §5.5),_provenance_depth(link-recursion throughsources, §5.1). Plusoutcrop verify <folder>: a trust report over any bundle. No surveyed tool does this. It converts OKF's paper promise ("agent-maintained corpora you can trust") into a SQLWHEREclause, and it is exactly Outcrop's constraint philosophy: a low-trust record is a valid file and a flagged record, never an error.
What Outcrop does NOT build:
- A hosted marketplace, bundle storage, or CDN. (Cost center; loses to GitHub.)
- Ratings, reviews, comments, or a social layer. (The skills directories show where that goes without an install base.)
- Payments/monetization. (Notion-template economics require consumer scale we don't have; revisit only with evidence.)
- A Outcrop-specific packaging format, lockfile, or manifest beyond what OKF specifies. (BRIEF #9's spirit: no bespoke conventions; the bundle is the package.)
- A fork or extension of the spec. We propose upstream via PR or we conform.
Revisit triggers:
- Google ships an official OKF registry → integrate it day one as the primary
upstream of
outcrop-index; our value shifts entirely to validation + client. - Any community directory passes ~1,000 bundles with a stable public API → consume it as an index upstream; do not out-breadth it.
- Users demand private/team bundle sharing → that is a hosted product (private index + auth), a revenue decision, not a community one.
- The
okf-bundletopic convention fails to take (< 50 repos by Q4 2026) → fall back to scanningokftopic + awesome-lists for index candidates.
3.2 Ubiquitous integration plan (sequenced)¶
- Claim the tagging convention. Write
okf-bundletopic guidance (tag = "this repo/subdir is an installable OKF bundle; root hasindex.mdwithokf_version"), publish it in the index repo, tag our own sample corpus, and PR the three awesome-okf lists to adopt it. Three repos use the topic today; whoever writes the convention owns the namespace. [the 3-repo count is verified; the opportunity is inference] - Be present everywhere bundles are listed. Submit Outcrop to
okf.md/tools, all three awesome-okf lists, BundleDex, and okfbundle.com;
list
outcrop-serveron the official MCP registry, Glama, PulseMCP, and Smithery. Cheap, compounding. - MCP first, GUI second.
search_bundles/install_bundletools land before the canvas browser; agents are the growth surface with momentum. - Everything Outcrop makes is a bundle. Canvases, skills, and themes
already persist as records (
type: canvas|skill|theme, perdocs/CANVAS.md) — so a dashboard, an agent skill, or a theme is shareable through the same install path as data. "Share this canvas" = publish a bundle. This is the community flywheel no data-catalog vendor can copy: their OKF export is documentation; ours is working software (a dashboard that renders on install). - Obsidian is interop, not integration. A bundle is a valid vault; the
demo loop (edit in Obsidian → watcher reindexes) already exists in
DEMO.md. Ship a one-page guide, not code. - Upstream presence. Watch the 66 open PRs on knowledge-catalog; file conformance issues we hit; propose nothing until we've shipped validators that give us standing.
3.3 Risks¶
| Risk | Read | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Google controls the spec — and hosts it in a repo marked "not an official Google product." Governance could formalize (good), stall (fine), or swerve toward Knowledge Catalog lock-in (bad). | Medium probability, high impact | Already partly handled: okf-spec-watch workflow + vendored spec + conformance tests. Add: never depend on fields beyond the spec; keep our extensions in producer-defined keys (spec §4.1 permits). |
| Spec churn. v0.1→v0.2 broke two fields in five weeks. Most ecosystem tooling still emits v0.1. | Certain, low impact each | Consume v0.1 via the spec's own fallbacks (§13: timestamp, # Citations); emit v0.2. Test both in the corpus. |
| Directory cold-start. An empty index convinces nobody. | Certain, self-inflicted if we build a marketplace | This is why the posture is ride-the-rails: the index launches pre-populated from the okf topic scan, Google's three sample bundles, and our flagship bundles — value on day one without any publisher adopting us. |
Trust/provenance of third-party bundles. An installed bundle is agent-facing text: a malicious Playbook concept is a prompt-injection payload the moment an agent card reads it. Attested Computation executor/attester resources are code references. |
High impact, underappreciated ecosystem-wide | Install-time trust report (tiers, staleness, unverifiable sources) before commit; never auto-execute executor/attester resources; folder policy warn|block applies to imports; provenance stamped on every install so WHERE clauses can quarantine by origin. Spec-conformant: we flag, we never reject (§11). |
| Directory capture — BundleDex (or successor) becomes the de-facto gate. | Low-medium | Our index consumes multiple upstreams and is itself an open, forkable bundle; we integrate winners rather than fight them. |
Part 4 — 30/60/90-day actions¶
Sizing: S ≤ 2 days, M ≤ 2 weeks, L > 2 weeks. Owner: eng / product / community.
Days 0–30 — claim the rails¶
| # | Action | Size | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Write + publish the okf-bundle topic convention; tag our sample corpus repo |
S | community |
| 2 | outcrop install <git-ref> MVP (clone/subdir → folder via transaction path, provenance stamp, Restore = uninstall) |
M | eng |
| 3 | MCP tools search_bundles (over local index copy) + install_bundle |
M | eng |
| 4 | Computed columns _trust_tier, _stale in outcrop-query; outcrop verify report |
M | eng |
| 5 | Submissions: okf.md/tools, 3 awesome-okf lists, BundleDex, okfbundle.com; MCP registries | S | community |
Days 31–60 — ship the index¶
| # | Action | Size | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | outcrop-index repo: index-as-OKF-bundle; seeded from okf-topic scan + Google samples; CI validates every listed bundle; PR-based curation |
M | product + community |
| 7 | outcrop publish (validate + lint + index.md + topic tag + index PR helper) |
M | eng |
| 8 | Bundle-browser canvas: query card + graph card over the installed index bundle | M | product |
| 9 | Three flagship bundles that only Outcrop makes shine (data + canvas + theme + skill in one bundle) | M | product |
| 10 | v0.1 ingestion fallbacks (timestamp, # Citations) with tests |
S | eng |
Days 61–90 — light the flywheel¶
| # | Action | Size | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | "Share as bundle" flow for canvases/skills/themes (select records → publish) | L | product + eng |
| 12 | Monthly community bundle showcase + contribution guide on the index repo | M | community |
| 13 | Obsidian interop guide (bundle = vault; edit-and-reindex loop) | S | product |
| 14 | Install-time trust report UX in CLI + canvas (tiers, staleness, origin) | M | eng |
| 15 | Checkpoint: measure okf-bundle topic count, index PRs from non-team authors, directory traffic; evaluate revisit triggers (§3.1) |
S | product |
Appendix A — Surveyed directories & ecosystems¶
| Name | Unit of distribution | Host | Curation | Adoption signal (as of survey) | Lesson for Outcrop |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| knowledge-catalog (OKF home) | OKF bundle (dir of .md) | GitHub | Google maintainers; PRs | ~8k★, 664 forks, 66 open PRs in 7 weeks [verified] | The spec is hot; the registry seat is empty. |
| BundleDex | OKF bundle | Publisher's GitHub; site indexes | Submit-by-push; bar unknown | 240+ bundles claimed [unverified — site unreachable] | Third parties already ride GitHub; breadth is not defensible. |
| okfbundle.com | OKF bundle | Site + hosted MCP endpoint | Unknown | Hosted MCP browse/search [partially verified] | MCP endpoint as directory surface is the interesting move — copy it. |
| Official MCP registry + aggregators | MCP server (metadata) | Publisher hosts; registry = metadata | Namespace verification; aggregators scrape | ~81.8k servers deduped across 5 sources [verified via mcptoplist] | Late first-party blessing still wins the namespace; aggregators then consume it. |
| Claude/agent skills directories (skillsmp, agentskill.sh, claudemarketplaces, …) | SKILL.md folder | GitHub; sites scrape | None visible | Five sites claiming 23k–2.4M skills [verified claims, dubious counts] | The anti-pattern: uncurated web directories commoditize to zero trust. Skills folder ≈ OKF bundle cousin — same fate awaits OKF directories. |
| Obsidian community plugins | Plugin (GitHub repo) | GitHub repo of listings + in-app browser | PR review by Obsidian team | ~6.1k plugins, 650 themes, 120M+ downloads [verified] | Registry = a git repo + the client as storefront. Directly copyable. |
| Hugging Face Hub | Model/dataset repo | HF (git-LFS) | Open upload; org verification; cards | ~2M models [approximate, from general knowledge — unverified this session] | The directory wired into the default tool (from_pretrained) wins the category. |
| Homebrew | Formula/tap (git repo) | GitHub | Core = PR review; taps = anyone | De-facto macOS package layer [general knowledge] | Decentralized publish (tap <user/repo>) + curated core: exactly the index-plus-GitHub split. |
| npm | Package (tarball) | npm registry (hosted) | None at publish; post-hoc security | Millions of packages [general knowledge] | Hosting everything = paying for everything + supply-chain liability. Avoid. |
| Docker Hub | Image | Hub (hosted) | Official images curated | Default-registry status won it; rate limits later pushed users to ghcr [general knowledge] | Default-in-client wins; hosting costs eventually tax the ecosystem. |
| Notion template gallery | Template | Notion | Marketplace review; paid tier | Creator economy at consumer scale [general knowledge] | Monetization needs consumer scale; premature for OKF. |
| Raycast store | Extension | Raycast (hosted) | First-party review | In-client, one-click [general knowledge] | Small curated + in-client beats large uncurated for tool ecosystems. |
| awesome-lists (linyiru et al.) | Link | GitHub | Maintainer taste | 3 OKF lists in 7 weeks; one is an OKF bundle [verified] | Curation demand exists; the index-as-bundle idea is already validated in miniature. |
Appendix B — Source notes¶
Unreachable from this build environment (proxy 403, so claims about them rely on search-index snippets): bundledex.net, okfbundle.com, okf.md, the HN thread (id 48517735). Everything cited from github.com, cloud.google.com, and the aggregator/blog links above was fetched directly or returned in search results during this session (2026-07-29).