Re: Web Payments CG Charter Proposal

On 01/11/2014 03:57 AM, ☮ elf Pavlik ☮ wrote:
>> The downside with having a charter is that we could inadvertently 
>> turn people with great Web payments ideas away from this group, or 
>> make it seem like the barrier to entry is too high (or that there 
>> is a barrier there when none exists).
> 
> Could you please explain more precisely how having a charter would 
> affect barrier to entry? Would it only give people slightly different
> impression or make process of joining and participating more
> complicated?

I've been having discussions with a couple of very large companies that
are interested in our work here. Specifically, their lawyers, who are
concerned about the IPR implications of joining a group with no scope.

For a few years now we've operated w/o a scope because we wanted to cast
a wide net and see what sorts of people join. Unfortunately, this
approach could be keeping large companies from joining the group. A
charter helps the lawyers understand what the current scope of the group
is and what the change process is for the charter. This allows them to
tell the engineers something to this effect: "You can join the group and
participate, if you see a re-chartering come up, tell me immediately so
I can review what's being rechartered". Having a process that's familiar
to these lawyers in place, such as having a charter, helps them feel
more at ease wrt. saying "yes" to their engineers when they ask to join
the group.

The process of joining and participating would be the same as it was
before, so the barrier to entry is still kept as low as it is now. The
scope just makes it more explicit regarding the sort of stuff we work on
here, which will help all of us stay more in sync with one another, and
help the lawyers find their way through their own corporate legal maze
to get some more engineers involved in the work here.

>> Once we have the charter in a shape where most of the group thinks 
>> we should vote on it, we will use this online poll to vote on the 
>> charter:
>> 
>> http://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/b40f9bee-7a3e-11e3-9dd8-a2f4e5bb7f8c/view
>>
> To stay honest I don't like that we will do formal vote using this
> voting system.

We can use any other one that we can get consensus on. I used this one
because it allows you to prove who voted w/o violating their privacy.
That is, even the admin can't tell how you voted. The voting system uses
homomorphic encryption so that everyone can verify that their vote was
counted w/o anyone being able to peek into how you voted.

> It only provides option of using google || facebook || yahoo 
> identities.

It provides email too, but it seems to be an either/or choice. If I
could get access to the emails on this list (I don't have access to that
information, even as a Chair), I could send the vote out to everyone
using just their preferred email address. Without that, we're going to
have to fall back on these big identity providers.

I'll check w/ Ben Adida, he wrote the system and may have some ideas on
how we can get some folks invited using their email addresses and others
by using their social profiles.

One downside with the way the vote is configured for the charter is that
we don't know if the people that are voting are from this group or not.
We could make it such that only the people that have emailed the mailing
list before the vote is called get a chance to vote. I could easily
extract those email addresses and send vote invites out to them.

> I remember W3C CG used to have pool option in WP setup. I also 
> remember this pool from WebID CG where we used our W3C identities: 
> https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/51933/webid-hash/ If everyone else 
> feels fine with using service of heliosvoting.org I will follow and 
> not bring this as an issue again! (at least for this vote)

If anyone has a better suggestion that would allow us to do verified
private voting online, we'd love to hear it.

-- 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 Monday, 13 January 2014 03:16:30 UTC