RE: Support for Verifiable Claims

Thanks for the helpful reply.

> Standards that provide new entrants a starting point to facilitate either
> adoption or contirbution to the larger problem.

Sure, but http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/927:_Standards – there’s no lack of standards in this space, and no agreement among SDOs (and open source projects such as hyperledger.org) how to split up the work, so there’s a good chance that yet another standards effort will create more confusion and delay solution to the larger problem. And ISO has just started a Blockchain and Electronic Distributed Ledger  Technologies committee http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards_development/list_of_iso_technical_committees/iso_technical_committee.htm?commid=6266604   (FWIWI think that’s premature too ☺)  That’s why several of us have been pressing for a clear explanation of how this proposal fits into existing ecosystems, exactly how a W3C data model and syntax could compose with existing APIs and protocols, and how the community that hopes to work at W3C can get the standards deployed in the real world.  That’s what “incubation” means to me; maybe it has happened and just needs to be documented so that those of us who have not been along on the journey can understand it, or maybe more work is necessary, I don’t know.

> we have focused the charter on delivering the smallest possible unit of
> work that provides value to the marketplace

Right, the team has given good advice to narrow the scope.  My concern is that most of the statements of support in this thread aren’t endorsing the narrowly scoped charter, they’re endorsing a vision for a future ecosystem with formats, protocols, APIs, state of the art cryptography, support for accessibility use cases,  and broad deployment.  I am asking for someone to explain what the path from data model to real world  distributed identity / claims system looks like.

> We need to the Task Force/Community Group to drive a broad,
>  fully formed market solution and recruit implementors to prove and/or
>  evolve to meet the reality of the marketplace.

This is probably the crux of the disagreement on this thread:  Should  W3C  start by building standards and recruit implementers to make it a marketplace reality, or should W3C provide a venue where implementers and other players in real markets collaborate to iron out their differences to improve interoperability, accessibility, security, etc.?  I submit (and I think Chris and Tantek agree) that the former approach might have been successful in the early days of W3C, but there are few successful examples of a standards-first approach in recent years.  That’s why we push for incubation-first - -build communities, get rough consensus and running code first, then standardize what is successful.

If there is rough consensus and running code around the proposed verifiable claims data model already, then I for one just need a clearer and more succinct guide to it than what the WG proposal offers.




From: Stone, Matt [mailto:matt.stone@pearson.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 1, 2016 5:46 PM
To: Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com>
Cc: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>; Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>; Michael Champion <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com>; Mark Nottingham <mnotting@akamai.com>; w3c-ac-forum@w3.org; public-webpayments-comments@w3.org; 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

Our challenge is one of balance. Particularly balancing between 1) the dynamic and organic developent of a broad solution that speaks to a strongly felt market need, i.e. portable, secure, trustworty personal claims that are tamperproof and verifiable from the source and 2) codifing and standardizing the knowlege we have and the progress we've made. Standards that provide new entrants a starting point to facilitate either adoption or contirbution to the larger problem.

With the aide of the AC, we have focused the charter on delivering the smallest possible unit of work that provides value to the marketplace--This is about as far away from a WaterFall process as I can imagine.

Existing technology standards have fallen short in a number of ways that we have enumerated several times.  We stand at an inflection point that boils down to this.  Either the existing standards solve this problem and the 50+ small and enterprise companies, whose success is dependent upon the free and frictionless transport of this kind of data are too dim to actually cobble them together, or we have identified a true gap that needs to be solved.  I haven't heard anyone doubt the tecnical aptitude of the Task Force contributors, so I lean toward the latter.

For many of us, this is a side job of a side job, nevertheless, we're voluteering to facilitate the modern practice of mananging the tension that exists in the balancing act above.  We need to the Task Force/Community Group to drive a broad, fully formed market solution and recruit implementors to prove and/or evolve to meet the reality of the marketplace.  Simultanesouly, we must standardize the buildig blocks so that the foundation of what we know and agree on can simply be a given.

Let's not boil the ocean, let's show incremental success.

 -stone

 ==
 Matt Stone
 Pearson
 501-837-5995



On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com<mailto:cwilso@google.com>> wrote:
I'll be (relatively) brief, as I'm deep in prep for a conference next week.

1) This is a far better laying-out of your case than I've seen before.  In particular, the "implementers" page you refer to twice in this message is not referenced at all from the proposed charter; nor is the status of the implementers, nor the incubated data model document.  All of those would have strengthened your case, and I'm not going to listen to the audio recording of your group meetings to get it, sorry.  It would be further helpful to understand what implementers would be shipping, or how they would use such a product; otherwise, it's like me saying "Chrome has two billion potential users".  But that aside, all that context is useful, and not easily (or at all?) findable directly from the charter proposal I reviewed.
2) Neither myself, Tantek, Mike nor Mark have it in our power to allow or disallow a VCWG to be formed.  We each only get one vote, same as anyone else.
3) I strongly agree with everything Mike said in his latest message, particularly
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).

In short, clarity and brevity counts.  I apologize if that sounds irritating; but this is a side job of my side job, I'm sure it's not easier for anyone else, and at the same time I've a commitment to trying to improve the quality of /TR/ at the W3C, and that means being intentional about what I agree the W3C should start WGs for.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 11:45 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com<mailto:msporny@digitalbazaar.com>> wrote:
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/