Further collaboration with W3C Management on web-payments.org

Hi all,

In an attempt to be proactive in dealing with PayPal/eBay's concerns
about the web-payments.org website and this community's positioning in
the larger ecosystem, I had a discussion with Ian Jacobs, W3C's Head of
Marketing and Communication. The discussion was good and very
collaborative. We came up with the following things that the group
should consider doing:

1. Gather consensus around which specs we're definitely working on in
   the Web Payments community group.
2. Make a few more modifications to the web-payments.org website
   attempting to clearly specify that the CG is not endorsed by the
   W3C, but it is also designed to create material that may be fed
   into W3C or other standardization bodies like the IETF.
3. Make a clear statement that although this work is not yet on
   the W3C recommendation track, as it matures, the community will
   evaluate whether or not they want to petition W3C to elevate it to
   the standards track.
4. Formalize a charter as not having one may be preventing
   organizations like PayPal from participating in the CG (due to
   unknown scoping concerns).

We're going to have to integrate this input along with all the other
good input we've gotten since PayPal/eBay's concerns were raised with
this group and apply it to the website and the operation of this group.

We also talked about other sections of PayPal/eBay's concerns email and
got confirmation on them not being issues:

1. We are not violating any W3C Community Group rules.
2. We are not violating the CLA.
3. We are not violating CLA publishing requirements wrt.
   web-payments.org.
4. We do have the proper language in the specs regarding the
   application of the CLA and IPR notices. Ian did say that W3C is
   considering changing the text from 'specification' to 'report'
   because some of the W3C Members like that word better, but that's
   a decision for W3C Management. The text in all of our specs comes
   from the ReSpec specification editing tool boilerplate. We use that
   boilerplate to keep ourselves inline with W3C's policies regarding
   changes to the W3C CLA.

Here are the actions that the group is going to have to consider taking
over the next several weeks:

1. Formalize and vote on a charter, which will include figuring out
   some of our operating rules (like how formal decisions are made).
2. Vote on which specs this group sees as being in their purview.
3. Modify the web-payments.org website to spin some of the statements
   in a more positive way (such as the 'ailing financial system'
   statements).

I'll send out a separate email for each one of these action items above,
as there are details that we're going to have to work through as a
community.

Thanks again to Ian from W3C for taking the time to talk through all of
these items in detail. We're continuing to try and find some consensus
around these issues so that we may go back to doing technical work.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Worlds First Web Payments Workshop
http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/

Received on Friday, 10 January 2014 14:50:03 UTC