As media creation pipelines evolve to become more distributed, our tools require new ways of talking about data beyond simple files on disk. OpenAssetIO is a new open source project that gives tools a common asset-centric interface for resolving, discovering, and registering production data. Recently, OpenAssetIO became the first project to be adopted by the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) at the Sandbox phase of the Project Lifecycle. Learn about OpenAssetIO's roots, what guided the project's evolution, and how we found alignment with the ASWF to bring it into the Project Lifecycle process. Curious about how you can engage with ASWF to contribute a new project? Come to this talk to learn and discuss!