Web Payments IG approves Verifiable Claims to proceed to W3C Management

Hi all,

The Web Payments Interest Group met last week at MIT in Boston to
determine if they wanted to proceed with the Verifiable Claims work.
While the minutes of those meetings won't be made public for the next
week or two, W3C Staff noted that we can share the general outcome of
the decision.

The decision was almost unanimous to progress the Verifiable Claims
proposal to W3C Management. Hooray! Congratulations to everyone involved
as this is a major step forward.

There were, however, three dissenting positions that we should take very
seriously and discuss in depth over the next few weeks. The telecon for
this week is canceled because many of us are at the Web Payments Working
Group face-to-face meeting in London this week. So, the rest of this
email will attempt to outline general next steps and specific work items
for the group.

The anticipated next steps at W3C are:

1. A modified charter is negotiated with W3C Management and the
   dissenting organizations.
2. Once we have consensus among all organizations involved, the
   expectation is that the modified charter and proposal will be put
   forward to W3C membership for a vote. The timeline for this is
   unknown at this point.
3. We will most likely attempt to have a Verifiable Claims
   face-to-face meeting at W3C TPAC 2016, but have not sorted out
   those details yet: https://www.w3.org/2016/09/TPAC/

We know of the following modification requests to the charter:

1. Constrain the charter to Education only.
2. Demonstrate that the charter is not competitive to JSON Object
   Signing and Encryption Web Tokens (JOSE JWT).
3. Remove or greatly narrow the overarching problem statement
   about self-sovereign ecosystem and goals from the charter.

The anticipated next steps for the Verifiable Claims Task Force and
Credentials Community Group are:

1. Determine if we want to constrain the charter to Education only.
2. Update the Data Model and Representations specification to clearly
   demonstrate that this technology is not competitive to JOSE/JWT.
3. Determine if we want to modify the problem statement and
   charter goals.
4. Plan our first face-to-face meeting, possibly at W3C TPAC in
   Lisbon at the end of September.

W3C Staff are currently drafting changes that they think would result in
consensus. Once we have those suggestions in hand, and once we've talked
with the dissenting organizations, we'll be able to have a better idea
about timeline.

The next Verifiable Claims telecon will be Tuesday, July 12th at 11am
ET. Dial in details can be found here:

https://w3c.github.io/vctf/#telecons

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Web Browser API Incubation Anti-Pattern
http://manu.sporny.org/2016/browser-api-incubation-antipattern/

Received on Monday, 4 July 2016 17:31:38 UTC