Re: Agenda: Web Payments Telecon - Tuesday, April 17th 2012

Whoops. Right you are. Hello group, "promisor" looks just fine to me as a
general term. Extended reasoning below.

On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Andrew Durham <ad@andrewdurham.com> wrote:

> David,
>
> Did you intend to send this just to me directly? It does not seem to
> have gone to the group.
>
> Andrew
>
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 03:08, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Andrew Durham <ad@andrewdurham.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> In the Crowdfunding: Assurance Variations thread, a couple of us
> >> thought that "promisor" and "promisee" in the Payment Intents section
> >> were unclear/equivocal.
> >>
> >> I suggested "proposer" and "supporter". "Funder" might also work for
> >> promisee. In any case, two different words, rather than two
> >> inflections of the same root, would help. Words that are somehow
> >> self-explanatory.
> >
> >
> > Also -- this doesn't speak to this particular word choice question, but
> is
> > about clarity in general, a best practice for clarity -- given a core
> set of
> > terms the dependent terms can be defined in terms of the core ones, just
> > like developing a set of theorems from axioms in any calculus, as a
> common
> > payments systems vocabulary is very much a calculus. By "calculus" I
> mean of
> > course "notation" which is what the word means, when talking about things
> > like "lambda calculus" and so on.
> >
> > So if we formally define general classes of roles account holders
> (source,
> > recipient) and a general time framework (present, future, past) and
> things
> > that can be held (artifact, fungible) the amount of common ground needed
> to
> > understand the documents can be reduced (at the cost, of course, of
> making
> > it less "friendly" but we're making specifications here, not marketing
> hype)
> >
> > To apply what I'm trying to say to the topic at hand (crowdfunding
> assurance
> > variations) after defining a core vocab, the exact language of the
> non-core
> > concepts doesn't have to be fixed beyond the local scope a particular
> > scheme's description of itself, and conformant schemes will be free to
> throw
> > darts at their thesaurus.
> >
> > Pledgemaker? booster? supporter? patron? friend? All of these, and more,
> > would make more sense than the others in various schemes depending on all
> > kinds of context and nuance, and mandating a particular term for a role
> of a
> > participant in a conformant scheme seems like overreach.
> >
> > To make what I hope is a final and concise restatement, terms should be
> > functional and general and useful; the set of reserved words should be
> > small.
> >
> > "promisor" seems perfectly fine, actually, as it's so ugly that nobody
> would
> > want to actually use it in a communications layer closer to the customer,
> > whereas "funder" and "supporter" are nuanced variations depending on the
> > nature of the receiving project, which natures we should avoid
> enumerating.
>