Verifiable Claims Telecon Minutes for 2016-01-26

Thanks to Brian Sletten for scribing this week! The minutes
for this week's Verifiable Claims telecon are now available:

http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-01-26/

Full text of the discussion follows for W3C archival purposes.
Audio from the meeting is available as well (link provided below).

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Verifiable Claims Telecon Minutes for 2016-01-26

Agenda:
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments-ig/2016Jan/0050.html
Topics:
  1. Interview Narratives So Far
  2. Responding to Identified Narratives
  3. Draft Charter Proposal
  4. Use Cases Document
Action Items:
  1. Manu to create a VCTF Final Report with input from 
    interviewees and then request feedback from VCTF/Credential CG 
    members.
Organizer:
  Manu Sporny
Scribe:
  Brian Sletten
Present:
  Brian Sletten, Manu Sporny, Dave Longley, Shane McCarron, Henry 
  Story, Eric Korb, Greg Kidd, Richard Varn, John Tibbetts, Daniel 
  C. Burnett, Gregg Kellogg, Jim Goodell, Matt Collier, Stuart 
  Sutton, David I. Lehn, Rob Trainer, Bill DeLorenzo
Audio:
  http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-01-26/audio.ogg

Brian Sletten is scribing.
Manu Sporny:  This is an official VCTF call. It is being recorded 
  and minuted.
Manu Sporny:  We'll talk about the individual interviews from the 
  experts we are speaking to. We are hearing about their 
  experiences so we can avoid some of the problems they have 
  encountered. We need to discuss how to respond to their feedback 
  and we need to discuss the draft charter we have.

Topic: Interview Narratives So Far

Manu Sporny: Brad Hill's input - 
  http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-01-08/
Manu Sporny:  We have had input from Brad Hill.
Manu Sporny:  These people are providing input in their personal 
  capacity. Brad works for Facebook, but he's not speaking for 
  them.
Manu Sporny: Jeff Hodges' input: 
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments-ig/2016Jan/0048.html
Manu Sporny:  Same thing with Jeff Hodges who is with PayPal, but 
  his input is his own.
Manu Sporny:  Jeff has been involved in a variety of identity 
  standards.
Manu Sporny: Harry Halpin's input: 
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments-ig/2016Jan/0049.html
Manu Sporny:  Harry Halpin is providing input based on his 
  personal experiences, not official W3C input.
Manu Sporny: David Singer's input: 
  https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments-ig/2016Jan/0051.html
Manu Sporny:  The latest one is from David Singer.
Manu Sporny:  We have a number of other interviews to have.
Manu Sporny:  The input we have gotten back is starting to form a 
  narrative. David Singer's summary is the best one so far.
Manu Sporny:  One of the things that is frustrating is that we 
  are getting feedback from people involved in the space who are 
  too busy to look into what we are working on but are providing 
  high level thoughts.
Manu Sporny:  As an example, "We've been down this path before, 
  why are we doing it again?"
Manu Sporny: We outline clearly what the differences are here: 
  http://w3c.github.io/vctf/#design-approaches
Manu Sporny:  The VCTF page makes it clear what is different 
  about this approach (e.g. User-Centric vs Service-Centric 
  approaches). We outline clearly what the differences are.

Topic: Responding to Identified Narratives

Manu Sporny:  Some of the people who are providing input didn't 
  understand this distinction. David Singer also stressed that we 
  shouldn't just focus on payments (also include education, health 
  care, etc.)
Manu Sporny:  We've been encouraged to study what has been done 
  before even though we have already done this research. The 
  feedback is coming from folks who are too busy to realize what we 
  have already done on this front or why.
Dave Longley:  We need to still do the write up of why the 
  existing technologies don't solve all of the problems.
Shane McCarron:  We need more talking points to expose all of the 
  good data you've collected over the last year.
Manu Sporny:  People are saying that the technology already 
  exists and we should just use it (OAuth, Open ID Connect, 
  JOSE/JWT). While we have done the analysis and found them 
  lacking, we haven't written those up.
Manu Sporny:  One of the output of the VCTF must be a gap 
  analysis of why these technologies are insufficient.
Henry Story:  There is a huge war in this space. Asking you to 
  differentiate yourself from existing technologies puts you in 
  opposition (and makes you enemies) of the existing technology 
  communities. How can we point out the differences without making 
  enemies.
Manu Sporny:  That is an excellent point. We need to be careful 
  about that. We know what doesn't work. Coming up with a list of 
  why they are deficient goes nowhere.  You end up arguing on 
  generalities. We have some very specifics Use Cases and things 
  we'd like to express and sign. We can talk about those specific 
  Use Cases and what the end result is if we pull in existing 
  technology and show how they don't meet the needs.
Manu Sporny:  Therefore we narrow it down to the problem we are 
  trying to solve vs an "Our community vs other community". We end 
  up talking about actual requirements.
Manu Sporny:  If we frame things like that, we should have a 
  better outcome.
Eric Korb: Still no audio
Greg Kidd:  I'm intimidated by the push back from all of the 
  experts, but we have the governance of this group to help us 
  manage the problem requirements and work on a reference 
  implementation.
Manu Sporny:  This is one of the strengths of the W3C process. 
  You have always have experts arguing over the right way to do 
  things but the process usually produces good results in the end.
Manu Sporny:  The question is whether the people in this group 
  are patient enough to work through the process or act somewhere 
  else.
Greg Kidd:  We have a development team and a set of use cases 
  that we think could work under this group.
Manu Sporny:  The cases where we see the most progress is when we 
  have a solid use case and can compare different technologies for 
  that specific problem.
Greg Kidd:  I am most interested in the endorsement of a 
  governance process rather than technical purity.
Manu Sporny:  That's the goal of the W3C's process. We need to do 
  a technical gap analysis to compare the suitability of existing 
  technologies for our user's needs and not reinvent the wheel.
Manu Sporny:  One of the outputs of this group will be a report 
  of all of these things as an input to the working group.
Henry Story:  This new group is mostly about producing Use Cases. 
  You can't actually say "This is better than this." Are these Use 
  Cases new so that they can't be solved by existing technologies.
Manu Sporny:  Some of the feedback is from people jumping ahead 
  to the technologies rather focusing on the Use Cases we've 
  produced. The feedback overall isn't as good as it could have 
  been if they'd had the time to engage more deeply to produce more 
  specific feedback on the problem statement.
Manu Sporny:  We might need to put a Charter in front of them. 
  When you are working on a charter document, people in the W3C 
  process usually get engaged in the content of the text.
Manu Sporny:  This group needs to produce documents to stop going 
  around and around on these points.
Dave Longley:  We got better input from Brad through the 
  interview process rather than the summary emails. We expect the 
  new interviews to produce better results. The ones who we only 
  got email feedback from didn't have time and are unlikely to have 
  time to review any new documents.
Manu Sporny:  We've gotten feedback from members of this group 
  who are experts in their own field in this space who don't 
  understand why these experts get to come in and control the 
  narrative.
Manu Sporny:  We are trying to find people who disagree with our 
  analysis.
Manu Sporny:  This doesn't mean we aren't going to do the work, 
  we just need to address that communication gap in some way.
Shane McCarron: +1 To dlongley
Dave Longley:  Some of the experts in our group can also provide 
  feedback through email and interviews. It might be good to have 
  that input on equal footing as well.
Henry Story: +1 Makes sense
Manu Sporny:  Some of the experts don't see other people asking 
  for these approaches, use cases, etc. Richard Varn and John T. 
  could jump in and provide that kind of feedback from the 
  education industry.
Richard Varn:  Tell me who to talk to.
John Tibbetts:  I've been hesitant to speak up. One of the 
  problems I've had is that it seems like a political issue, not a 
  technical issue.
John Tibbetts:  There are already sensitivities about specific 
  terms and technologies. Perhaps I can speak on the problems and 
  needs.
John Tibbetts:  There is an asymmetry in the responses. We are 
  taking an abstract approach to describing the problems but the 
  feedback we are getting are jumping straight to specific 
  technologies.
Dave Longley:  I think you should go ahead and talk about the 
  technologies when you are providing feedback. We as a group need 
  to avoid a technical bias, but as an expert you can provide a 
  free response.
Dave Longley: +1 To Dan!
Daniel C. Burnett:  I agree with what Longley said. Within the 
  W3C process, the asymmetry is always going to happen. You will 
  always get random comments from people who have no idea what 
  you've done. But you still need to address them. Our goal is to 
  get started, however. We should respond to the feedback that 
  might block the specific problem might block getting started.
Manu Sporny:  Excellent comment, burn.
Manu Sporny: Harry Halpin said: "Another option is to scope down 
  and aim at a particular problem domain, for example a uniform 
  vocabulary for educational credentials. Throwing out privacy and 
  security concerns for high value use-cases like banking is a 
  non-starter, as should be obvious."
Manu Sporny:  Harry doesn't know that the Lumina foundation 
  exists that there has been a $5 million initiative to establish 
  these standards, Open Badges, etc. There are people already 
  defining vocabularies outside using JSON-LD and it is happening 
  outside of W3C.
Manu Sporny:  That's the kind of thing the education industry 
  experts need to push back on to address the feedback.
Manu Sporny:  W3C management are seeing these assertions but not 
  seeing the pushback from the education industry.
Henry Story: And this should be done by replying to the mailing 
  list I suppose?
Manu Sporny:  Maybe we should put those comments in a final 
  report and get specific statements from representatives in the 
  education industry.
Eric Korb: +1
John Tibbetts: +1
Richard Varn: I will do that when the feedback is done and 
  address the specifics related to education needs and interests in 
  this initiative.
Henry Story: Certainly not.
Dave Longley:  I'd also like to point out that there a 
  presumption that people want to throw out privacy and security. I 
  don't think that is true and it would be good for the experts to 
  clarify that point.
Henry Story: I mean we certainly don't want to throw privacy and 
  security out.

ACTION: Manu to create a VCTF Final Report with input from 
  interviewees and then request feedback from VCTF/Credential CG 
  members.

John Tibbetts: + 1 .. I'll respond
Richard Varn: Sounds good
Eric Korb: +1 Ack, need also input from Heatlhcare experts
Daniel C. Burnett:  I know we're supposed to be working on use 
  cases, it's not obvious where they are. Can we point us to where 
  they are.

Topic: Draft Charter Proposal

Manu Sporny: http://w3c.github.io/vctf/charter/proposal.html
Manu Sporny:  Yes, that is the last agenda item after the Draft 
  Charter Proposal.
Manu Sporny:  I took a stab at a draft charter proposal. It's 
  broken into two phases.
Manu Sporny:  The goal of Phase I is to produce a data model and 
  format for credentials and verifiable claims. The timeframe is 
  very aggressive. But the hope is that the Working Group would 
  start in five months (we'd vote in May-July timeframe) and the 
  only thing it would work on is data model, data format and 
  signature mechanism.
Manu Sporny:  After Phase I is done, we will have a way of 
  expressing verifiable credentials with consensus. Then Phase II 
  is to produce workflows and protocols to create, store and share 
  credentials.
Manu Sporny:  Does this make sense?
Manu Sporny:  Are there any concerns?
Shane McCarron:  The timeline feels aggressive given what we know 
  about the W3C.
Manu Sporny:  Well, the proposal is very minimal - just data data 
  model, format, signature mechanism.
Dave Longley: Perhaps say different types of APIs (browser API, 
  http API)
Manu Sporny:  We could be doing the gap analysis document 
  starting now so that it is ready when the WG starts.  That will 
  help compress the timeline.  Does that address your concerns 
  ShaneM? [scribe assist by Shane McCarron]
Henry Story:  There are lots of different ways of doing things 
  (e.g. LDP as a protocol for managing these technologies).
Dave Longley: Scope for Phase I should probably include that 
  Phase II is a goal so it is intentionally considered in the 
  designs for Phase I even if there's no Phase II output.
Gregg Kellogg:  These things always take longer. We might try to 
  account for that and suggest 24 months and just try to do it more 
  quickly.
Manu Sporny:  That's good feedback. This whole process was way 
  longer than anyone expected.
Jim Goodell: The data model, data format and signature mechanism 
  seems doable in the timeframe, esp. given the group is not 
  starting from scratch.
Manu Sporny:  Please look into the charter draft and text. It's 
  based upon the Web Payments template which was heavily reviewed 
  by W3C Membership and this is what came out of it. We're trying 
  to use a template that has made it through the process.
Henry Story: So LDP already offers an answer to read-write over 
  HTTP, which is why this feels nearly like a couple of different 
  WGs 1. A group to show how that fits into LDP 2) a group for 
  developing a new DHT system. Both of them are actually compatible 
  because RDF is based on URIs so one can link both.
Dave Longley:  I think the Phase I goals should consider that 
  there is a Phase II on the horizon. Our scope might say, our 
  output is only the format, model, etc. but they are compatible 
  with the browser APIs we might need to work with in Phase II.
Manu Sporny:  If we get Phase I done, people can move forward 
  with various approaches (to bblfish's comments about LDP) for 
  defining various protocols.

Topic: Use Cases Document

Manu Sporny:  There is a Google Doc that has the latest language 
  in it.
Shane McCarron: 
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GySrTXAYpwa4vDPsGE3BMA42FwIAqAyLGigKuKUTGks/edit
Shane McCarron: 
  https://github.com/opencreds/website/blob/master/specs/source/use-cases/index.html
Manu Sporny:  There is also a GitHub link.
Shane McCarron: And we want it to look like this: 
  https://www.w3.org/TR/web-payments-use-cases/
Manu Sporny:  Move the stuff in the Google doc over to the Respec 
  doc.
Gregg Kellogg: Preview: 
  http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/opencreds/website/blob/master/specs/source/use-cases/index.html
Shane McCarron:  I am trying to create sections to have the 
  various contributors can collaborate (ShaneM, gkellogg, bsletten 
  and burn)
Henry Story: Perhaps I'd just add also that one of the use cases 
  has to be that this can work across protocols, so that one can 
  tie into ipfs, etc... This is one way to make it tie into the Web 
  architecture, and allow it to be very general, which I guess most 
  other protocols don't satisfy, but tying themselves to specific 
  syntaxes or protocols.
Shane McCarron: Use the opencreds repository so that we are not 
  under more onerous IPR restrictions.
Manu Sporny:  We'll do it in the OpenCred repo because the CG IPR 
  policy will clear faster than the IG IPR policy.
Shane McCarron: Let's meet on #vctf-editors on this server
Manu Sporny:  I will have a discussion with them about whether 
  they want to pull it into the IG. We've already had this 
  discussion with the WebPayments IG and the goal was to do as much 
  in the CG before pulling it into the IG.
Manu Sporny:  Gkellogg asked about the one repo per spec. This is 
  being done elsewhere and it working. W3C is moving over to GitHub 
  doing one spec per repo. The issues and the specs are tightly 
  coupled. You can hand the repo over to a WG.
Manu Sporny:  We do a GH repository reassign to preserve history, 
  autonomy, etc.
Gregg Kellogg:  How do you deal with shared definitions, 
  automated tools to keep self-referencing is consistent.
Manu Sporny:  ShaneM has done a fantastic addition to respec to 
  pull in documents (glossaries in separate repositories). We're 
  doing that in the WebPayments. You modify the glossary and all 
  the other specs reflect the changes.
Gregg Kellogg:  When we did the CSV stuff we'd make a decision 
  that affected multiple specs where we could branch and make sure 
  all affected documents are managed together. I am happy to adapt 
  to what the group wants to do.
Daniel C. Burnett:  I can adapt too. It depends on the groups and 
  specs. We've found it less common to do the same edits to 
  multiple specs rather than being concerned about making updates 
  that affect other specs.
Shane McCarron:  I'm not familiar with what you said I've done. 
  How do we bring in common terms from a different repository?
Manu Sporny: http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/latest/glossary/
Manu Sporny: http://wicg.github.io/web-payments-browser-api/
Manu Sporny:  Latest glossary from the Web Payments IG. We pull 
  that into the Web Payments browser API document.
Manu Sporny:  The entire terminology section is pulled into that 
  document at runtime.
Manu Sporny:  You added that functionality, so thanks.
Shane McCarron:  The extension I did was not intended for this. 
  I'm shocked.
Shane McCarron: Neat!
Manu Sporny:  Are the editors good with the approach? Shane is 
  going to create sections and the editors can collaborate without 
  stepping on each other.
Brian Sletten:  I'm good with it.

Received on Tuesday, 26 January 2016 20:48:24 UTC