RE: Support for Verifiable Claims

Manu,

As I said in another message recently:

"Long experience in W3C has taught many of us that unless there is a vibrant ecosystem that understands the specific problem they are trying to solve and generally agrees on what a solution looks like, creating a WG seldom leads to a successful standard.  If such an ecosystem exists for verifiable claims, and all it really needs to function better is the standardized data model and serialization syntax the proposed VC WG charter has in scope, point us to the details. "

Take this as an attempt to give constructive feedback: If the VC WG proposers can educate us on what is the ecosystem of existing verifiable claims products / services offered by the companies listed in the implementers document, explain how interoperability is blocked by differences in data models and syntaxes, and persuade us that a W3C Recommendation would break the interop logjam, I suspect we would be more sympathetic.  It doesn't seem to be asking too much for the WG proposers to write this stuff down in a single place and in a coherent way, rather than expect the AC reviewers to chase it down in various blog posts, meeting minutes, other websites, etc.  and figure out how to connect the dots.

I'd also be more receptive if someone explained how all the existing standards do or do not fit together here.  David Ezell once explained that you're proposing essentially a new architectural layer to glue them together.  That sounds promising, but it's not obvious to me as a non-specialist how this relates to the architecture diagram in the VC WG proposal.  Nor is it obvious to me whether you’re proposing a generic data model/syntax or one that is constrained to work with the Linked Data stack (which I have gotten hints of in various scans of meeting minutes).

> signalling to other organizations that only a W3C specification can provide. 
This is a bit of a red flag for me.  Many of the specs in https://w3.org/TR should *not* be taken by other organizations as a "signal" of much of anything.  In my view, W3C should be Recommending technologies that have earned their own credibility in the real world, not offering its imprimatur to specs in the hope of giving them more credibility.  

Finally, it's not clear to me whether it's worthwhile standardizing a VC data model/syntax in isolation from all the protocols, formats, APIs, and encryption schemes needed to make a verifiable claims ecosystem work.  The answer from the proposers seems to be "we don't have enough understanding of the problem and possible solutions to standardize the whole stack, so we'll start from the highest level of abstraction with a data model."  Maybe that will work, but it sounds a lot like the Waterfall Model of development that the software industry has moved away from over the last 20 years.   If that is not the answer to the "why start with a data model?" question, please offer a clear rationale in the charter or supporting documentation.

Bottom line:  the vision of a self-sovereign identity and claims ecosystem that leverages recent innovations such as distributed ledgers is VERY exciting and we are participating in all sorts of efforts aimed at addressing some of the use cases you've identified.   You're just seeing skepticism that collaborating on specs independently of code is a useful way to get there, and warnings that the W3C working group process is an not an efficient way to run that collaboration at its current stage of maturity.

-----Original Message-----
From: Manu Sporny [mailto:msporny@digitalbazaar.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 11:45 AM
To: Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com>; Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>; Michael Champion <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com>; Mark Nottingham <mnotting@akamai.com>
Cc: w3c-ac-forum@w3.org; public-webpayments-comments@w3.org; Stone, Matthew K <matt.stone@pearson.com>; Richard Varn <rvarn@ets.org>; Drummond Reed <drummond@respectnetwork.com>; Nathan George <nathan.george@evernym.com>; Kerri Lemoie <kerri@openworksgrp.com>; Nate Otto <nate@badgealliance.org>; David Chadwick <d.w.chadwick@kent.ac.uk>; Eric Korb <Eric.Korb@accreditrust.com>; Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@blockstream.com>; Phil Archer <phila@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Support for Verifiable Claims

Hi Tantek, Chris, Michael, and Mark,

In an attempt to summarize your concerns wrt. Verifiable Claims, each of you effectively asked the following two questions:

On 10/26/2016 08:12 PM, Chris Wilson wrote:
> 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?

Michael and Chris, these questions were raised earlier this year by both of you during the Web Payments IG review of the proposed Verifiable Claims charter. I believe the Web Payments IG answered your questions at that point by referencing some of the same information that will be shared below. The question above sounds like the same question from both of you. The VCTF will attempt to answer it again using information shared with you previously in addition to more information we've gathered since that discussion with you.

Tantek and Mark, this may be the first time you're seeing this data, so let us know if this is an adequate answer or if you remain concerned about the questions raised regarding incubation and implementations.

The questions each of you raised were a topic of discussion at our first Verifiable Claims face-to-face meeting[1][2] and our most recent telecon[3]. This email condenses all of the discussion on this topic in an attempt to make it easier for each of you to see that we do have future implementation commitments, we have current implementations, and why we need a WG for the work to progress.

On 10/26/2016 08:12 PM, Chris Wilson wrote:
> 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,

There are 14 commitments from Software Vendors to implement (in code) a product of the WG:

http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/implementers/

There are commitments from Issuers, Repositories, Inspectors, and Influencers to deploy a product of the WG:

http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/implementers/


The deliverables of the WG are concrete, and are listed in the charter:

http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/charter/#deliverables


One of the deliverables is a a data model and syntax, which has been incubated for at least two years (some would argue 4+ years):

http://opencreds.org/specs/source/claims-data-model/


The specification (or some variation of it) has been (or is currently
being) implemented and deployed in real world scenarios by at least 8 organizations, some of whom are W3C members, some of them with millions of customers (ETS and Pearson, for example):

http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-11-01/#60


I urge you to listen to the audio minutes from our last call (starting at 27:30 going until 34:00) which has representatives from each organization listed above asserting that they have implementations:

http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-11-01/audio.ogg


On 10/26/2016 08:12 PM, Chris Wilson wrote:
> 2) it was explained why we NEED a WG here - i.e., what wall is the 
> ecosystem hitting by doing work in an incubation?

We need a WG because we desire broader interoperability.

We have a spec, we have preliminary implementations, and desire the sort of interoperability and signalling to other organizations that only a W3C specification can provide. To paraphrase Matt Stone (Pearson) and Richard Varn (ETS) from our most recent set of meetings: ETS and Pearson have been trying to inter-operate for more than a decade and see the Verifiable Claims work as a way to get these two large organizations and their customers to inter-operate with the assurance that everyone is implementing to the same standard. A standard that has gone through the W3C Process is desired. There are many more organizations that desire this outcome, as we've demonstrated[4] with our broad industry survey data.

My question to each of you, Tantek, Chris, Michael, and Mark is whether or not this data allays your incubation and deployment experience concerns to the point of allowing a W3C Verifiable Claims WG to be formed?

-- manu

[1]http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-10-27/

[2]http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-10-28/

[3]http://w3c.github.io/vctf/meetings/2016-11-01/#60


--
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny) Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/

Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2016 21:42:52 UTC