Re: Input needed: US Federal Reserve Payments Position Paper

On 12/7/13 1:52 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:
> The first very rough draft is here, it still needs a good bit of polishing:
>
> http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/wiki/FedPaymentsPositionPaper

Here's my response to the version I found at 10am Pacific time, Monday 
Dec 9th:

1. IMO, “world-class technology companies” and “driving the Web to 
reach its full potential” could both be cut or replaced.  These seem 
to me like marketing-style writing. People in government won’t 
necessarily use or like business buzz-terms.

2. The “Abstract”, as it stands, doesn’t seem like it’s actually an 
abstract, which would be a condensed summary of all that’s to follow. 
Rather, it’s an Overview, or a Preamble of some sort. Maybe an 
“Executive Overview”, since you conclude it by saying the whole 
document is an “overview of the work that the Web Payments group at 
the W3C is doing…”

3. Currently there are three preambles -- the Abstract, the 
“Conformance…” and the “Principles…”
This seems awkward. One way to (possibly) fix this is to amalgamate 
the second two, which are written from the same point of view, into a 
single section.
I.e., the second and third sections would be under a single title, like:
“Conformance With Open And Democratic Standards”

This could probably work merely by cutting the “Conformance…” and 
“Principles…” titles and putting a single new title at the top of the 
first one; the paragraphs could stand as they are, in the same order.

4. The section created by doing this -- the two sections together -- 
I'm not sure should stand at the beginning; perhaps it should go at or 
near the end of the whole document, or within the document somewhere. 
It seems to be at a different logical level than the "Abstract" 
(=Executive Overview), and also than the body of the document. Not 
sure of this but I think it's worth a try before leaving it where it is.

5. The first two sentences of the “Improving the Automated Clearing 
House…” section both have typographic errors (word missing, extra 
word) that made them non-grammatical and difficult to read. This is 
distressing in terms of the amount of material to come.  ;-)  Plus, 
IMO “find the political courage” seems loaded and might offend some 
people in government.

At this point I paused and scanned over the rest of the document, and 
the above combined with:
    a) the heavy detail I can see in the rest
    b) its length
    c) the time of year, when everything seems like a rush
    d) my disorientation about what the structure of the overall 
document is (what’s abstract, what’s summary, what’s detail, how do 
the detail sections relate to one another).

led me to say:
Too long and complex. I won’t read the rest.

I know it’s a work-in-progress with a tight deadline. I hope the 
feedback at this point will be of some help.

Steven Rowat

Received on Monday, 9 December 2013 18:24:52 UTC