Re: agenda+ Proposed changes to draft Web Payments Working Group Charter

> On Jul 30, 2015, at 6:35 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thursday 2015-07-30 17:35 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>> I received comments from Apple that I believe improve the draft charter, and I think it is worthwhile
>> having the changes in the charter when we send it to the Membership for review. I believe the
>> changes are in line with our intentions. I also want the IG to have an opportunity to review them.
>> 
>> I have made the changes to the editor’s draft of the charter:
>>  http://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/latest/charters/payments-wg-charter.html
>> 
>> You can compare with the draft we reviewed on Monday:
>> http://www.w3.org/2015/06/payments-wg-charter.html
>> 
>> Here are my edits:
>> https://github.com/w3c/webpayments-ig/commit/3ae5a43f5e2e38622440eca2384fea1508e8e6dc
> 
> I think the combination of these edits (3ae5a43f) and the edits made
> on Monday in revision 32cca1af have reduced the scope of the group
> in a way that I consider dangerous.

Hi David,

Thank you for the careful read.

> 
> The previous edit (32cca1af) removed the phrase:
>  as well as the external actors that will interface directly with
>  them
> from a sentence that, at the time, began with:
>  The scope of the charter focuses on
> This edit (3ae5a43f) now changes:
>  The scope of the charter focuses on
> into:
>  The scope of the charter is
> which in turn makes the sentence a definition of the charter's
> scope rather than a description.  The entire sentence is now:
>  The scope of the charter is the interaction between payer user
>  agent and payee Web application.
> 
> This is problematic because it requires that a payer user agent be
> part of a closed system in order to implement the standard.  In
> other words, a user agent that wants to use this standard has to
> have a nonstandardized protocol for interacting with payment
> instruments (likely involving business deals with payment networks
> or banks), and any payment network / payment scheme that wants to be
> usable in any particular browser likewise needs to make a deal with
> that browser (or the wallet software that it defers to) to be usable
> in the browser.

I don’t believe that is intended (so good catch).

Does the following replacement text address your concern?

 "The scope of the charter is the set of interfaces necessary to enable an interaction between payer user agent and payee Web application.”

Ian


> 
> This also contradicts the deliverables list of the charter, in that
> there are deliverables outside of that narrow scope (as I think
> there should be).
> 
> The scope of the working group should also include interaction
> between the payer user agent and the payment scheme.
> 
> -David
> 
> --
> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
> 𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
>             What I was walling in or walling out,
>             And to whom I was like to give offense.
>               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

--
Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org>      http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                       +1 718 260 9447