Status of official Web Payments Working Group (Re: FYI: Ribbon Is Building A Peer-To-Peer Payments For Consumers)

On 11/20/2013 07:17 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
> One more reason for W3C to make webpayments a full fledged Working 
> Group. What's the status of that Manu?

Here's where we are as of today:

In order to create an official W3C Web Payments Working Group, we need
to get enough W3C members to agree that this is an area around which W3C
could successfully standardize some technologies. The typical way this
is done is by holding a workshop and seeing how many W3C organizations
step forward in support of the work. This is why I've been globe-hopping
almost non-stop for the last 7 weeks; to build support for the work
we're doing here.

The workshop is scheduled for March 24th and 25th in Paris, France. We
have room for 100 participants. In order to hold a successful workshop,
we need a broad set of participants from banks, technology companies,
financial sector, mobile operators, web browser manufacturers, and
government to show up. The purpose of the workshop is to identify common
pain points and see if the W3C could address some of those pain points
with the creation of Web standards related to payments.

To kick-start a typical W3C workshop, we require 2 chairs and 15-25
participants on the program committee. We already have our primary chair
and around 8 program committee participants. There will be a call for
position papers (2-4 paragraphs) and a call for presentations (several
pages) which will be reviewed by the program committee. We need to get
the call for papers out by the end of this month if we're going to be
able to meet our March deadline. If we miss that deadline, this could be
pushed back for another 6 months and we don't want that to happen.

A number of you on this mailing list will be receiving emails either at
the end of this week, or early next week to participate on the program
committee. We hope to get the call for papers out by early December.
Here's a rough timeline:

November 29th, 2013: Rough consensus on chairs/program committee
December  5th, 2013: Call for Web Payments Workshop position papers
Jan-Feb 2014       : Program Committee selects papers/participants
March 2014         : "Web Payment Pain Points" Workshop in Paris

If the workshop is successful, we'd try to follow it up 3 months later
in New York City with a workshop to determine what the scope of work for
the Working Group should be. If that is successful, we'd hope to have
our W3C charter ratified by September 2014 and "officially" start work
at that point.

This is why we're not waiting for charter ratification to work on specs
or core technologies here. We're working with rough consensus and
working code :). We're working on these tasks in parallel because the
W3C process moves slowly (by design) and if we were to do all of this
serially, we'd miss our opportunity to make a significant impact.

We're also looking for an independent to be a point of contact at W3C
for the Web Payments work. To work on it full-time, whose salary would
be paid for by a W3C member organization. So, if you have any candidates
or people you think would be good in this capacity, send me an email.

Any questions/concerns with the current direction or status of getting
an official Working Group created at W3C?

-- 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 Thursday, 21 November 2013 16:52:46 UTC