Re: Updated Verifiable Claims Use Cases document

On 6/22/16 5:21 AM, Shane McCarron wrote:
> Thanks to a bunch of people for chiming in on the use cases.  Most
> people agreed that the use case scenarios we had were sufficient
> (although we were missing a few - added now).  The biggest set of
> comments was about presentation and organization.  So I, with the help
> of many others, have reorganized the document to be more about users
> and how they will benefit.
>
> You can see the latest (and hopefully stable) version
> at http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/use-cases/
>
> I do not plan to make any further edits to this document prior to the
> meeting on 1 July (unless someone points out an embarrassing typo!).
>
> I look forward to your feedback.  Feel free to use the github issue
> tracker.

The new organization seems to improve it greatly, IMO.

Except: I'm puzzled to see that the interesting 
whistleblowing/pseudonymity use-case in the previous version of the 
document has been removed. It was listed under "Social Authority", 
about the journalist who wanted to publish information without 
revealing their real name.

I'm curious whether this was a policy decision? And if so, was it more 
that 'it's not important enough', or that 'it's important but we won't 
mention it for X reason'? If the former, I disagree; if the latter, 
I'd like to know the reason.

Also, I'd like to know if this pseudonymity capability is still 
envisioned to exist in the data model as a whole? Specifically, is 
there anything that would prevent a holder from registering an 
"Identity Profile" under a name that was not their legal name, and yet 
associating verifiable credentials such as professional credentials, 
proof that they've published certain public documents in the past, 
etc.  Or, to put it in the positive: does it still appear possible to 
do this? (I've assumed to this point that it was).

Two other points about the document as a whole.

One -- too late to change probably, but I'll note -- one type of 
important User Need overall category that I believe could have been 
provided in section 3 is Publishing, which is a large industry that is 
undergoing a revolution as it moves online. To some degree it's 
included under "Professional Credentials -> Social Authority"  (or it 
used to be, in the previous version), but I think this doesn't give it 
enough status relative to its  social prominence. Publishing would 
include professionals writing books, journalists, fiction authors, 
music publishers, bloggers, and so on. I guess it's sort of a cross 
between the categories you have of "Retail" and "Social Authority", 
and IMO it's something that could explosively expand -- particularly 
if the combination of Web Payments and Credentials are worked out as a 
universal standard that supports it.

Second, it would be nice if there could be prominent links in the 
document to the other documents in the suite. For example, I wanted to 
jump to the data model to check something (from the Use Cases), and 
couldn't find a way and ended up searching through emails for the last 
announcement, and found:
w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/
and got there that way. Perhaps that address could be given at the top 
of each of the documents, so they can be navigated-between easily?


Steven Rowat

>
> --
> Shane McCarron
> Projects Manager, Spec-Ops

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2016 15:18:26 UTC