Jason Chin, Richard Durbin, and myself (Gene Myers) found ourselves together at a workshop meeting in Dagstuhl Germany and hammered out an initial proposal for an assembly format. We thought GFA was a good start and built our design around it. We now offer it up for comment, criticism, and refinement with the hope that a penultimate version of it might be accepted by the GFA community and gain further significant adoption.
The white paper is here