Web Payments Telecon Minutes for 2013-12-11

Thanks to Dave Longley for scribing today! The minutes for this week's
Web Payments telecon are now available here:

https://payswarm.com/minutes/2013-12-11

Full text of the discussion follows for archival purposes at the W3C.
Audio of the meeting is available as well (link provided below).

--------------
Web Payments Community Group Telecon Minutes for 2013-12-11

Agenda:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2013Dec/0045.html
Topics:
   1. US Federal Reserve Response Paper
   2. Branding Issue w/ payswarm.com vs. web-payments.org
   3. Web Payments Workshop
   4. Web Identity and WebID differences
Chair:
   Manu Sporny
Scribe:
   Dave Longley
Present:
   Dave Longley, Manu Sporny, David I. Lehn, Pindar Wong,
   Erik Anderson, Charles McCathie Nevile
Audio:
   http://payswarm.com/minutes/2013-12-11/audio.ogg

Dave Longley is scribing.
Manu Sporny:  Any updates/changes to the agenda?
David I. Lehn:  We should talk about the PaySwarm /
   web-payments.org branding issue.
Manu Sporny:  Ok, we'll add that to the Agenda.

Topic: US Federal Reserve Response Paper

Manu Sporny:
   http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/wiki/FedPaymentsPositionPaper
Manu Sporny:  some of the more recent edits to the paper have
   made it harder to read by using language that is more complex
   than necessary. It comes across as a bit too lecturing and
   academic now, we want the paper to be accessible to general
   readers, we want to bring the fed in to work with us, not scare
   them away.
Pindar Wong:  i agree, that pretty much addresses my concerns. I
   leave the editing consistency etc. to you, i think we have an
   advantage to being totally transparent here. I ask that you
   tighten up the document, i would change the ordering (putting web
   payments first) and do some alphabetical ordering, i think the
   ending is great, and i like that we invite the fed to participate
Dave Longley:  I've fixed many of the problematic changes that
   make the document harder to read.
Manu Sporny:  we're trying to make the fed paper more
   accessible/open and be an invitation to the them and keep it
   friendly vs. how it has kind of turned out in the last few days
Manu Sporny:  if you have any input Erik, that would be great
Erik Anderson:  i'll take a look as soon as the call is over
Manu Sporny:  great, that basically covers the first item, once
   we make some final edits we'll be in good shape ... was hoping to
   clear some edits with joseph on the call today, but he's not here
   yet
Manu Sporny:  we'll get it cleaned up and ready to submit soon.
   We'll submit it at 5pm ET today.

Topic: Branding Issue w/ payswarm.com vs. web-payments.org

Manu Sporny:  we've been going around the world talking about the
   web payments work, we had codenamed all this technology
   "payswarm" and we've got the site where everything lives right
   now. We've been getting some pretty strong pushback from payment
   companies thinking we are pushing a proprietary solution. It's a
   misconception on their part, and we don't know if this is some
   sort of strategic positioning such that they can take credit for
   the Web Payments work after the fact.
Manu Sporny:  So the "PaySwarm" branding is either confusing
   people, or people want it removed due to strategic/political
   reasons.  The main argument has been that they don't want a
   proprietary solution to the web (which PaySwarm is not at all -
   completely open, developed transparently, no patents, etc.). So
   what we can do is mirror the payswarm.com work on
   web-payments.org and change the messaging over to "Web Payments"
   and push the PaySwarm code name far lower (to the specs?).
Manu Sporny:  to further reinforce that we're working out in the
   open and transparently and there's no patents we're trying to
   assert on this work and anyone can use it and implement it
Manu Sporny:  So, it seems like the payswarm brand is getting in
   the way
Erik Anderson:  i agree with that
Erik Anderson:  putting "open" in front of everything is what the
   community looks for
Erik Anderson:  still need a codename for the tech, like open
   payment solution or something
Erik Anderson:  something generic
Manu Sporny:  ok, we'll figure out where the community wants to
   go for the name of the tech
Manu Sporny:  i'm sure people will have input on it, but we don't
   want to end up in a bikeshedding discussion about it
Manu Sporny:  we don't want the payswarm brand name to block what
   we're trying to accomplish here

Topic: Web Payments Workshop

Manu Sporny: http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/
Manu Sporny:  the announcement for the workshop went out last
   week
Manu Sporny:  we have our first set of chairs, we've got the
   beginning of the program committee, we have a fairly broad
   representation from mobile, offline/online payment processors,
   security folks, wired/wireless telcos, gsma, bloomberg, number of
   other folks
Manu Sporny:  we're trying to round out the program committee
   getting more banking and govt and retailer participation
Manu Sporny:  we're focusing on that over the next couple weeks,
   and doing outreach to get people to submit papers and to do
   presentations, etc.
Manu Sporny:  we'll be finalizing chairs and committee by end of
   december, papers due feb 8, we hope to have the program and
   papers posted by beginning of march, deadline for registration is
   the 19th, worshop is 24-25th of march in Paris, France
Manu Sporny:  That's where we are with the web payments workshop.
   We have SWIFT involved now, which is great, they are the
   standards group for all of the world banks. It's a big deal that
   they are involved along side tech companies, we are demonstrating
   lots of industries here, pretty broad discussion about payments
   on the web in general to be had.
Manu Sporny:  Pindar, we'd like participation from ICANN and
   Creative Commons in the workshop program committee with a
   deadline for december 30th and the program committee is filling
   up fairly quickly, so the sooner we get input from the other
   organizaitons you're involved with the better
Pindar Wong:  ok, send me a side note and i'll work on that
Manu Sporny:  anything else we should talk about or inform the
   public about?
Erik Anderson:  i'm expecting that this will branch out from just
   payments to other financial protocols (securities, etc.) on the
   Web
Erik Anderson:  i have a lot of contracts into JP morgan, etc. if
   you'd like me to bring in a large bank, and securities folks.
Charles McCathie Nevile:  We have to be careful abou tthe scope
   of this workshop. It's pretty much about payments right now - can
   we figure out a clean way to pay people via the Web.
Charles McCathie Nevile:  i think we don't want to go out of
   scope for the workshop
Manu Sporny:  if we make it too broad it will be too difficult to
   move everything (payments, securities, etc.) together at the same
   time
Manu Sporny:  i agree with chaals, but i'm also concerned about
   what Erik mentioned. We've titled it "web payments" and people
   are getting the impression that it's only about payments on a
   website. If we do justice to the protocols here, this will also
   be as the core protocol for mobile payments. It will be able to
   be extended as the core payment protocol for point of sale
   devices, etc. there's no reason other things can't use the web
   payments protocol behind the scenes as it's really just a
   mechanism to do payments over the Internet. It can easily extend
   out to retail POS and electronic cash registers, and what Erik is
   getting at, retail banking, larger financial sector initiatives
   like that.
Manu Sporny:  we want the workshop to be fairly constrained in
   talking about how we're focused on web payments right now,
   because we don't want to bite off more than we can chew, but the
   vision is to apply this technology to all payments.
Erik Anderson:  its transfer of electronic assets, it goes as far
   as that because it's generic. People should understand that.
Erik Anderson:  JP morgan has had a patent on an open payment
   system since 1999, so it's important to have them involved.
Charles McCathie Nevile:  i think people would like to have JP
   involved, i dont' think it's a negative thing, there are several
   people who are chasing them to be involved.
Manu Sporny:  we should deifnitely get them involved
Erik Anderson:  i won't involve anyone that we don't discuss, we
   want to make sure we are adding value not subtracting, because
   every addition takes up time from others
Manu Sporny:  we'll take this back to the program committee for
   the workshop. There's an open question about how we're messaging
   the workshop to the public. We're trying to get aligned on our
   messaging and what exactly the scope is. We'll take this input
   back to the Web Payments Workshop Program Committee.

Topic: Web Identity and WebID differences

Manu Sporny:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2013Dec/0013.html
Manu Sporny:  question raised on mailing list on difference
   between WebID spec and Web Identity spec
Manu Sporny:  Melvin said he didn't see much of a difference, but
   there is a pretty big difference
Manu Sporny:  WebID is mainly about cryptographic login on the
   web and they are trying to layer on top of X.509 stuff that's
   been built into the Web since the 90s. The basic expression of
   identity is the same-ish, but the Web Payments Identity stuff is
   very different from there on out.
Manu Sporny:  payments Web Identity is about how you store govt
   credentials, etc. with your online identity and read/write that
   identity
Manu Sporny:  how does, for instance, persona tell a website that
   there's extended identity info somewhere so if you're logging
   into a bank and the bank wants to verify that you're a citizen of
   country X, how does the bank automatically do that with your
   approval? There is no clear answer to that question in WebID.
Manu Sporny:  the web identity payments stuff also has to do with
   how we tie in cryptographic assertions into someone's identity
   online
Manu Sporny:  this identity mechanism that we're talking about
   has to enable writing to the identity (not covered by WebID), you
   have to be able to read specific data with permission from the
   identity holder, for instance, and immigration control wanted to
   read your info, there must be some authorization from you to let
   them do that, if a vendor wants your shipping address, there has
   to be an authorization from the identity holder to allow that to
   happen and we have to spec that out
Manu Sporny:  the fifth thing that's different is that we want to
   be able to read and write to the identity via post and redirect,
   purely via web browser to bootstrap the process, but we need an
   automated way of doign ACL lists so you can do things like say
   you are fine with your bank getting your mailing address from you
   whenever you want, but only your bank, etc.
Manu Sporny:  that's not something the WebID group is attempting
   to address
Manu Sporny:  the final thing that we're a bit different with is
   that we are putting into the spec how you do digital endorsements
Manu Sporny:  this will tell institutions like banks and govts
   how you digitally sign information such that that information can
   be placed into one of these identities, so someone can issue an
   electronic passport, your age, etc. whatever they can do that by
   following this spec
Manu Sporny:  those are the high-level differences in this spec,
   there's one other difference which is WebID requiring the use of
   Turtle as the serialization format; the people working on the web
   identity payments spec believe turtle doesn't have enough
   deployment and we'd prefer JSON/JSON-LD over something like
   turtle
Manu Sporny:  that isn't to say that systems can't
   content-negotiate for turtle, they can certainly do that
Manu Sporny: Number of Web APIs tracked: 10,503
Manu Sporny: Number of JSON-based APIs : 4,918
Manu Sporny: Number of RDF-based APIs : 74
Manu Sporny:  but based on programmable web API stats, JSON is
   the clear winner over RDF-based APIs and RDF uses multiple
   serialization formats, many of them are RDF/XML, and may not even
   use Turtle, but assuming they all do, it's a tiny number to
   compare against JSON
Manu Sporny:  if we're creating these Web apis we have to have
   JSON as the primary mechanism of communication, doing anything
   else is going against the mainstream for how apis are done today
Manu Sporny:  that's an overview of how this work (web identity
   for payments) is different from WebID
Manu Sporny:  we also plan to integrate with persona, etc.
Erik Anderson:  the problem i have is that the names are
   ambiguous
Erik Anderson:  identification/authorization, etc are better
   spelled out than using "id" and translating to other languages
   makes it even more difficult, as for turtle, i don't even know
   what it is, JSON is well known.

-- 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 Wednesday, 11 December 2013 17:48:24 UTC