Re: Support for Verifiable Claims

To be clear - I share Tantek's concerns.  I think somewhere my position
might have been misunderstood as "anti-verifiable claims work," which is
not correct.

My concern is not that I don't think enough organizations think something
should be done about verifying claims; my concern is about a pattern we've
had in creating working groups to address abstract problem spaces, without
concrete plans and concrete implementations.  The reason we've been
championing incubation of new standards in CGs lately has been, as I put it
at the TPAC meeting, to enable efforts to fail gracefully - that is, to
avoid prematurely baked an abstract solution into a "standard" before it's
been fire-tested in the real world.

I believe quite firmly that the role of incubations is to turn abstract
solutions into concrete proposals, and test them out in the ecosystem
before baking them into a Recommendation.  My biggest concern right now, as
Tantek laid out, is that "support" that is not a direct process of
"prototype, implement and ship", does not seem to lead to a concrete,
real-world solution.  This seems to lead in the direction of designing an
ecosystem on paper, baking it into a specification, and then deploying the
ecosystem; that seems to repeat the XHTML mistake, to me.

Before it is claimed to the contrary, this should NOT be translated to
"lack of support from browser manufacturers = no WG".  It should be read as
"we shouldn't build specs to create ecosystems - we should build specs to
support ecosystems that develop."

I would feel much more positively about this charter if 1) there were
commitments to implement some product of the WG, and its deliverables were
more concrete, and 2) it was explained why we NEED a WG here - i.e., what
wall is the ecosystem hitting by doing work in an incubation?

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 4:40 PM, Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
wrote:

> Out of curiosity, is this just a big cheerleading technology wishlist
> thread, or are y'all actively implementing verifiable claims
> prototypes and trying them on the open web?
>
> (I didn't see "implement", "prototype", or "incubate" mentioned in any
> of the chain of +1s previous in the thread, mostly just "contribute"
> which I suppose we are all doing by emailing about it, but we can do
> that within existing IGs/CGs.)
>
> I want a verified pony as much as the next person, but at some point
> the framing starts to look more like a solution looking for problems
> (or problems aspirationally assuming they'll be solved by a claimed
> foundational panacea) rather than something that actually benefits the
> web platform directly.
>
> E.g. perhaps pick one specific area that verifiable claims may
> potentially benefit that needs something like it badly (up to
> advocates to prototype/demonstrate workability to be sure), like
> WoT/IoT, which is currently beset by the wide deployment and
> misdirection[1] of quite a few "unverified" devices.
>
> (just did a quick web search on "verifiable claims" "web of things"
> and found a few pages that mention both, but nothing that actually
> connected these two in any substantive way. Hard to believe this email
> is the first suggestion thereof, earlier references welcome.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tantek Çelik
> AB member
> Web Standards Lead, Mozilla
>
> [1] I.e. I assume y'all have seen:
> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-
> powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 1:35 AM, Rinke Hoekstra <rinke.hoekstra@vu.nl>
> wrote:
> > Dear All,
> >
> > The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam also supports the Verifiable Claims WG
> Charter, and is looking forward to contributing.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Rinke Hoekstra
> >
> >
> >
> >> On 21 Oct 2016, at 20:20, j.j.spaanderman@dnb.nl wrote:
> >>
> >> +1 to the Verifiable Claims WG charter on behalf of DNB.
> >>
> >> Best regards,
> >> Jurgen
> >>
> >> Van: Hakkinen, Mark T
> >> Verzonden: vrijdag 21 oktober 2016 20:08
> >> Aan: w3c-ac-forum@w3.org
> >> Cc: public-webpayments-comments@w3.org
> >> Onderwerp: RE: Support for Verifiable Claims
> >>
> >> +1 to the  verifiable claims working group charter
> http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/charter/
> >>
> >> Educational Testing Service supports this charter and looks forward to
> contributing to the work of the group.
> >>
> >> Mark
> >>
> >> --
> >> Markku (Mark) T. Hakkinen, PhD
> >> Managing Sr. Research Developer
> >> Accessibility, Standards, and Assistive Technology Research Group
> >> Center for Cognitive, Accessibility, and Technology Sciences
> >> Educational Testing Service
> >> Rosedale Road
> >> Princeton, New Jersey
> >> 08541 USA
> >> +1 609 734 5014
> >> mhakkinen@ets.org
> >> http://www.ets.org
> >>
> >>
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