OpenTHC: A Comprehensive Guide to the Open-Source Cannabis Platform

If necessity is the mother of invention, then OpenTHC traces its lineage to the era immediately after voter’s legalization of cannabis in Washington and Colorado in 2012. Before licenses were issued or seeds sprouted there was a tricky issue: data.

The traditional logistics and retail sales needs of a modern consumer market were clear, but governmental reporting and tracking mandates were also a priority. As state regulators contemplated standards, long awaited guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice came in the form of the Cole Memorandum. The document called for “a tightly regulated market in which revenues are tracked and accounted for.” Suddenly, “seed-to-sale compliance” was a required for successful legalization.

OpenTHC began in 2014 as a platform that integrated government traceability systems for cannabis enterprises. It’s grown to include an expanded suite of free and open source software for all actors in the industry. Reliably transmitting data among cannabis platforms is paramount to long term health and success of the industry, so OpenTHC ensures a baseline set of data able to be sent between platforms through their common API. The firm has helped more than 500 individuals in cannabis industries around the world, creating a new field of industry expertise and a proven track record at improving reporting operations and compliance.

Specifically, OpenTHC builds and open source software which is publicly available through their GitHub, and maintains the OpenTHC Platform. The platform consists of the OpenTHC API and a variety of Service Applications built from a common application architecture focused on the reporting responsibilities of each actor in the cannabis industry. Rather than work on a closed system, our goal is interoperability, a system capable of meeting the needs of any licensee. Services our applications can perform include: Directory (DIR), Track-and-Trace (TnT), Cannabis Reporting Engine (CRE), License Applicant Portal (LAP), Point-of-Sale (POS), Proxy Interface w/Payload Examination (PIPE), and the Operations Control Panel (OPS).

The OpenTHC API allows for applications which normalize communication
between actors in the regulated environment. Each API component works to define
the objects tracked in the regulated environment. There are some core definitions, like Company, License, and Contact identity, along with other more specific definitions for regulated material, including Product, Variety, Crops, Lots, and Lab Results which are reported as linked to core identity definitions. Tracked receipts such as Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions are reported linking core identities and regulated material. Data passing through API operations is validated each time a request is made, and requests failing validation are rejected while displaying clear, contextual errors. With OpenAPI specification governance there is a pathway for state regulators to both make modifications and communicate changes to cannabis reporting requirements to stakeholders at all levels.

A variety of different software vendors operating in the cannabis technology space, each with unique processes and terminology approaches, makes interoperability a tedious challenge. But OpenTHC software helps reduce this through a provided JSON schema and samples, as well as a REST (or JSON-RPC) style API. The intention is having standard base data models for objects in the Cannabis Industry which are representative of the common data all of our software shares, plus a common language, which provides a basis for data increased interoperability. When platform vendors only have to work with one API, they can publish outbound data through our environment. Using OpenTHC as the foundation lets businesses choose the vendor that’s best for them while still moving a little faster. Industry leaders can leverage their data to work to create standards for interoperability between cannabis software.

Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifiers (ULID) are leveraged for plant production and subsequent stages like harvest, quality assurance, production, transportation, and point of sale workflows, capturing business information and key performance indicators. ULIDs are linked into a network which follows cannabis’ chain-of-custody and is capable of material trace-back to the origin. Capable of producing 280 unique 26-digit identifiers per millisecond, ULID identifiers in QR Code representations ensure each action and object in a workflow is properly and uniquely identified, and can be mapped again to another stage in the production workflow. QR Codes have a track record demonstrating their fast
responsiveness, wear-and-tear resilience, and being a more ecologically and financially sound approach than RFID tagging of plants and material. However, the OpenTHC Platform can adapt to electronic forms of asset tags like RFID, allowing businesses to buy the tags on the open market and then assign platform-defined object identifiers to them.

Another benefit of the OpenTHC approach is our practice of Lean Product Development which in programming helps minimize business risk, gives a scientific basis for outcome assessment during development, and maximizes returns on investments. Sometimes a patient can articulate discomfort, but only their doctor understands their diagnosis or treatments. When our clients demonstrate a technological problem, lean product development is an efficiency which keeps our team nimble in troubleshooting solutions.

In addition to the business side of OpenTHC, our executive team will be establishing the OpenTHC Foundation. The group will be a nonprofit organization owning all intellectual property granted to it by OpenTHC or the open source community. The values of OpenTHC as a technology firm are straightforward:

• Stability for the business owners and for the software, as well as for other technology providers.
• Reliability and consistency in tracking and reporting functions necessary to keep the industry moving.
• Compatibility for all license types and actors that allows them to communicate when using a common traceability platform.
• A business and regulator sector which recognizes these other values can only be achieved by working together, with a spirit of community and consensus.

For a decade OpenTHC has offered a flexible, thorough, economically viable, and socially conscious approach to comprehensive cannabis traceability and reporting needs. Through a tradition of moving the data obstacles related to cannabis, we’ve helped our clients, and legalization, successed. In the coming weeks we’ll be publishing additional details about our team, our technology, and the kinds of challenges we can help elected officials and entrepreneurs solve. With the data needs for cannabis certain to grow in the coming years, our team has the services and expertise needed to meet the moment.