An open package repository for Minecraft mods, drawing inspiration from (among others) winget-pkgs for structure, Maven for certain metadata, and Homebrew for its Cask system.
This repository will be where the development of mod packages goes, though tooling should support multiple package lists.
This repository will be the human-level interaction for packages, though for the sake of writing tooling would likely be built into another "machine" format (such as JSON).
The data will be open for all to use and consume, launchers, web devs, anyone - developers are encouraged to built whatever they like on this data. The important thing is user choice, they may decide which site they browse for searching packs for example, or what CLI they use to install mods, or what launcher they use.
To draw comparissions to other projects, think of Homebrew's Casks or NPM Registry.
I have tentatively make an IRC channel, #modpkgs, on EsperNet.
XML is a great language for humans to write with, and with time we'll be able to assign the manifest files a strong, documented, XML schema.