Re: Input needed: US Federal Reserve Payments Position Paper

On 12/09/2013 01:24 PM, Steven Rowat wrote:
> On 12/7/13 1:52 PM, Manu Sporny wrote: 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.

Fixed. Although, I'll note that:

"to lead the Web to its full potential" is W3C's mission statement. :P

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/

> 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…”

Fixed.

> 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”

Joseph removed the section and we're figuring out how to integrate the
ideas into the body of the document.

> 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.

Hopefully fixed, you were looking at a very rough first draft.

> 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.

Agreed, and removed.

> 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

Removed most of the heavy, unnecessary detail.

> b) its length

Deleted a bunch, about 1.5 pages worth.

> c) the time of year, when everything seems like a rush

Yeah, but that's the Fed's deadline... can't change that much. :)

> 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).

Hopefully it flows a bit better now?

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

Very helpful, thank you. I'd love for you to have a second look and give
further feedback if possible.

-- manu

-- 
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 Tuesday, 10 December 2013 02:43:01 UTC