Re: Input needed: US Federal Reserve Payments Position Paper

Joseph, a few suggestions:

1. As Dave Raggett said, you can't say the W3C will do this or that. We
do not represent an official W3C position here, those statements can
only be made by W3C management and it will take months to get buy-in for
that. If we put in those statements, we'll be mis-representing the W3C,
which will endanger the transition of our work into a W3C Working Group.
This is a clear red line, we must not cross it.

2. Even stating that the W3C Web Payments Community Group will do
this/that is not possible given our timeframe. We run on consensus, and
we don't have time to form consensus before submitting the paper. So,
the best we can do is outline the technologies we're working on and
where we think the US Fed can help as facts/opinions coming from
individual authors of a paper submitted by members of a group operating
as a CG at W3C. It's a distinction that is important to make. The paper
isn't our position as a group, it's the position of a few members of
this group (the ones that co-author the paper with me). We can't
misrepresent the views of this group either.

3. While I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, I'm concerned
that the way you worded both sections is unnecessarily antagonistic. We
want to draw the US Fed into this group to participate, showing them
that we have a solution to some of the problems they outlined, not come
across as a group that is making large demands of it.

4. The changes that you are requesting are more about politics external
to this group and things that this group is not working on at all. I
realize that we need both sorts of changes to move forward, but this
group is not involved in any of the standards that you outline in the
"Conformance with Open Standards" section. WTO, IMF, ISO/IEC - we have
almost no involvement with those groups and it's hard to translate what
you're writing into something that's actionable by the US Federal
Reserve. It comes across as a radical group making demands of an
organization that is not going to be able to make those changes in the
next 5-10 years if ever due to the current political environment.

On 12/09/2013 07:44 AM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
> = Conformance with Open Standards = = Principles of a Free and 
> Democratic Society =

While I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, I'm concerned that
the way you worded both sections is unnecessarily antagonistic. It
treats the US Fed as an adversary rather than a partner. Phrases
like:

"W3C web payments community group calls upon the US Federal Reserve
Board to align its system with the International Monetary Fund"

are so politically charged that it'll marginalize the work we're doing
here. Additionally, changing what I wrote:

"Unfortunately, the lack of political will at the Federal level to
support new technologies like"

to[1]

"We recommend that Federal Reserve find the political courage to engage
current-generation technologies"

is a change for the worse, it wrongly paints the Fed as weak, and doing
that is no way to win friends. :)

In short: suggest, don't demand.

Could you re-write those two sections with this input in mind. I'm also
going to have to go through what I wrote and make sure it doesn't
violate any of the suggestions above, I have a feeling that it does. :)

Steven's feedback is also good, the paper is now too long and
hodgepodge, we need to start aggressively condensing and deleting
unnecessary content. I'm going to start with the technical mumbo jumbo
that I wrote at the end.

-- manu

[1]
http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/wiki/index.php?title=FedPaymentsPositionPaper&diff=133&oldid=132

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
http://blog.meritora.com/launch/

Received on Monday, 9 December 2013 20:04:36 UTC