Re: DIF/W3C member attribution issue

On 01/31/2018 08:21 AM, Daniel Buchner wrote:
> On a personal note: I spent half a decade at Mozilla, and even longer
> participating in W3C groups, so it hurts to read about how people
> think I and MSFT are conspiring to harm standards efforts I am 
> personally pushing hard for in our company and externally. I have 
> prided myself as always being above board, honest, and probably one 
> of the most anti-corp/crony people you’ll ever meet

Hey Daniel, thanks for the response, the reassurance is helpful and
helps cohesiveness and trust between the various communities involved in
building this decentralized technology stack out.

I don't think anyone meant any of this personally and my personal read
on you is as you say above.

> just consider that next time you talk about MSFT’s role in all this.

However, I'm also not going to make the mistake of thinking that your
personal motivations are 100% aligned with MSFT's motivations in the
space or even that MSFT's internal motivations are aligned. Many of us
know some of your colleagues and they are not you, and MSFT is not them.
MSFT is a very different organization than Mozilla, for better or worse,
and I say that without judgement.

Which brings me to my main point:

> * We haven’t coordinated a single PR event other than our initial
> org launch, people retweeting our DIF Medium posts, and some rando 
> Twitter messages.

Maybe DIF should start coordinating a bit more on some general
guidelines for its community in order to ensure that we're all working
toward a common goal ensuring that credit is given when due and that
blog posts don't misappropriate who is doing what work and where.

> * If a member of DIF doesn’t attribute something to your liking, I 
> can 100% guarantee it is not some sort of DIF, MSFT, or IBM 
> conspiracy (if you knew me, you would know I am being honest when I 
> tell you this)

It's true that there are other reasons that could be at play, but
without discussions like this, we're left to wonder. These are not small
organizations, these organizations have history. Some of these histories
don't paint the organizations in the most favourable light when it comes
to standards efforts or marketplace competition.

> * In our only ‘official’ content I am aware of that mentions DIDs,
> it just says we’re contributing reference implementations, or that
> we’re big fans and using the spec in our other technical work

I don't think the issue is with your official content. It was with what
the message seemed to be on the uPort blog post, which Pelle has updated
to a degree. It may be that Pelle was unaware of what work was being
done where, or it could have been something else.

I personally chalked it up to an honest mistake, which is why I asked
for the correction on the mailing list and Pelle graciously accommodated
the request.

> Please come to me or others to address issues you may have.

That's what happened in this case, right? A blog post was written, I
asked the author for a change and the reasoning behind it, and then
raised the issue in the community (with DIF members on the call) that we
should be careful about messaging. The message should be that we're
building a big tent and to properly attribute who is working on what and
where.

My experience in new technology and standards work over the past decade
plus has been that success breeds many parents, and like all parents,
they tend to be a bit too exuberant about their role in making their
children successful. Some unknowingly... some knowingly.

So all of us have to be very careful about messaging and making sure
we're supporting the creation of a healthy and vibrant community as free
of infighting and jerks as we can muster. This future we're building
together is going to take a much bigger group of people than we have
right now.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The State of W3C Web Payments in 2017
http://manu.sporny.org/2017/w3c-web-payments/

Received on Wednesday, 31 January 2018 21:37:11 UTC