Web Payments Telecon Minutes for 2014-10-15

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

https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-10-15/

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

----------------------------------------------------------------
Web Payments Community Group Telecon Minutes for 2014-10-15

Agenda:
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2014Oct/0058.html
Topics:
  1. Introduction to James Dailey from Mifos
  2. W3C TPAC - Web Payments CG Presentation
  3. Web Payments Roadmap Review
Chair:
  Manu Sporny
Scribe:
  Dave Longley
Present:
  Dave Longley, Manu Sporny, James Dailey, David I. Lehn, Evgeny 
  Vinogradov
Audio:
  https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-10-15/audio.ogg

Dave Longley is scribing.
Manu Sporny: Today is a quick intro of James Dailey and his 
  interest in the group and then W3C TPAC Web Payments CG 
  Presentation, talking about the roadmap, and then reviewing use 
  cases feedback. Any questions or changes?

Topic: Introduction to James Dailey from Mifos

James Dailey: http://mifos.org/
James Dailey:  Started about 8 years ago to bring an open 
  platform to microfinance, we've expanded and rewritten it to be a 
  core transaction platform and used for retail for direct banking, 
  we have 100s of implementations globally, we have several dozen 
  integrators, to serve the needs of their banking partners, it's 
  completely open source, it's Java, MySQL, etc. We have a pretty 
  involved API, connecting to the Web interfaces, etc. I'm 
  interested in integrating a Web payments platform or mobile 
  payments platform with our system. We want to put this up in the 
  cloud and offer a full stack for mobile payments in various 
  countries, etc.
Manu Sporny:  That sounds great and fairly aligned with the kind 
  of stuff we're working on here, something like mifos would be 
  good to prove interoperability.
Manu Sporny:  Have you dealt with W3C in any way before?
James Dailey:  Way back in the 90s I was working on the OASIS 
  project.
Manu Sporny:  I was wondering if you're a W3C member.
James Dailey:  Nope.
Manu Sporny:  The CG is completely open and anyone can join, but 
  the reason I ask is that there would be an interest in getting 
  you involved in the Working Groups that get spun up.
Manu Sporny:  We'd like to have you be represented in the 
  technical work, we don't have any open source/banking/financial 
  platforms involved right now.
Manu Sporny:  Is the org a non-profit?
James Dailey:  Yes, and it's based in Seattle, but we're very 
  virtual.
Manu Sporny:  Great, that's aligned with W3C (also very virtual). 
  We'd like to have your area of expertise represented in the 
  group, we'll take more of this offline.
Manu Sporny:  Moving forward, we'd be interested in hearing if 
  we're meeting the needs of the mifos platform, it's a perfect 
  example of where we'd like to see the technology used.
James Dailey:  I'm not one of the devs on the platform on this 
  point. There's a regular dev call on Thursdays that anyone can 
  join. For now I'm getting a feel for where you guys are at and 
  looking at your archive and getting where the state is.
Manu Sporny:  Ok, great.

Topic: W3C TPAC - Web Payments CG Presentation

Manu Sporny:  So this work started 4-5 years ago, we created the 
  CG about 2 years after that. W3C is ~400 member orgs, most big 
  technology orgs are part of W3C. We've been lobbying W3C to make 
  web payments a core part of the Web, making payments secure and 
  as easy as it is to send an email today. We've had some great 
  success over the last year. We had the world's first Web Payments 
  workshop in Paris this year, a bunch of W3C orgs joined and 
  decided that Web Payments should get done. Over the past month 
  there was a vote to officially get this work started at W3C. The 
  vote will say that the work has been started, and in 2 weeks on 
  27th,28th in Santa Clara, CA, at W3C TPAC there will be a first 
  face-to-face meeting.
Manu Sporny:  The meeting will be about what type of work the W3C 
  membership would like to do about Web Payments. The minutes from 
  the meeting will be public and you'll know all the companies that 
  participated after October.
Manu Sporny:  This agenda item is about discussing what we'll be 
  presenting (the CG) for an hour at TPAC.
Manu Sporny: https://web-payments.org/specs/source/use-cases/
Manu Sporny: https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/
Manu Sporny:  The use cases are a boiling down of the use cases 
  that came out of the workshop earlier this year.
Manu Sporny:  These are some docs we can talk about and present 
  in the one hour at TPAC.
Manu Sporny:  So the question is, other than the use cases and 
  the roadmap, what are the main points that we want to make?
Dave Longley:  Other than those two documents, it's important 
  that we emphasize that a lot of work has taken place in the CG 
  around this technology and keeping the scope focused on what we 
  think is achievable. That was discussed earlier in the year. 
  [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  We have technical specifications to look at - that 
  ties into road map and use cases. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  I think talking about those three things would be 
  good enough for the hour that we have. [scribe assist by Manu 
  Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  We also have the credentials CG that will be 
  talking in the hour following us. It's good that this will be the 
  first major discussion and it will be about the work the CG has 
  been doing. We probably want to avoid talking about credentials 
  until that meeting/presentation.
Manu Sporny:  The feedback that we've gotten from the chairs is 
  that they don't want to presuppose any set of use cases. They 
  want the W3C membership to try and work through what the use 
  cases should be. The downside for that is that we already did 
  that at the workshop and it takes a long time to do that.
Manu Sporny:  It might be good for us to have a very-high level 
  review of design criteria and use cases.
Manu Sporny:  But at least saying, for example, we've got "data 
  portability is important".
Manu goes down use case list outlining examples we could provide.
Dave Longley:  One thing we could do is start off in areas that 
  are clear where we could get interoperability - initiating 
  payments, digital receipts, etc.  [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  We could then go into things you're talking about 
  at a high level - general idea - we've found at least two areas 
  that we can focus on to get something standardized to get payment 
  processors to interoperate. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  We want to give them a higher-level overview at 
  first - these are the areas that we can standardize. We don't 
  want to dive into the details too early. Different payment 
  processors are out there - standardize on how we initiate a 
  payment and then provide digital receipt on how that happens. 
  Details inbetween are largely out of scope. There are a lot of 
  other use cases that can be created from those two basic things 
  we think we can standardize. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  Then we can go into data portability, etc. [scribe 
  assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  20 Minutes of presentations, 40 minutes of 
  questions. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  We do have that roadmap document, we list the 
  entire stack of specs/techs for the CG to work on. It could be 
  missing things that other CG members want in there, but to date 
  these are the specs we have in there. If other people want to add 
  things they should create a spec and publish it for us to add it.
Manu Sporny:  The problem with the roadmap is that we haven't had 
  a chance to vote on it, but we do know that the group has 
  approved the techs/specs.
Dave Longley:  One thing we could do is say - here is a set of 
  technologies that have been approved by the group, and this is a 
  proposed way to put it into a roadmap to move forward. This is a 
  way that we could get these proposed technologies in there. The 
  technologies themselves have been approved by the group. [scribe 
  assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  We'll put that out there and if anyone from CG has 
  any concerns we can tweak it.
Manu Sporny:  So 20 mins of presentation, keep it high-level, let 
  people know there's a use cases and roadmap. Let them know 
  there's a set of techs/specs for the work, etc. and go into 
  questions at that point.
Manu Sporny:  Anyone else on the call have thoughts/concerns 
  about how we'll be presenting this at TPAC?
Manu Sporny:  The agenda will go out later today. The schedule is 
  Monday and Tuesday (27-28th) are all day sessions on Web 
  Payments. On the 27th we'll have a 1 hour slot for this CG and 1 
  hour slot for Credentials CG. The rest of the time will be Web 
  Payments talk and the agenda will be out later today.
Manu Sporny:  In the morning on Tuesday we'll talk Credentials 
  and then later in the afternoon we'll recap.
Manu Sporny:  On Wednesday we'll review what happened.
Manu Sporny:  That's for a review for members that aren't 
  directly involved in the work to understand what has happened and 
  what will happen in the near future.
Manu Sporny:  I'll put together the slide deck and hopefully we 
  can review by end of today or tomorrow
Manu Sporny:  James, did that make sense? You're jumping right in 
  the middle of all this stuff, could you make out what's going on?
James Dailey:  Sure! It's very understandable, I'm sure there's 
  lots of politics I don't get.
Manu Sporny:  There aren't too many politics just yet; and W3C 
  will focus on the technical work to avoid any politics between 
  the big orgs. The focusing is on use cases, tech, and 
  implementations.

Topic: Web Payments Roadmap Review

Manu Sporny: 
  https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/#technology-stack
Manu Sporny:  This outlines the tech stack that the CG has 
  approved with votes and we lay it out so people can understand 
  how the stack looks and what's done and what isn't.
Dave Longley:  We may want to put another box in there with 
  vocabularies. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
David I. Lehn:  It may be difficult to make everything match up 
  in a box format. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  Here's the Credentials CG technology stack: 
  http://opencreds.org/specs/source/roadmap/#technology-stack 
  [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  This group originally started out as the Web 
  Payments group... the Credentials group was split off to deal w/ 
  identity/credentials for other industries (including 
  finance/banking) [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Dave Longley:  The Credentials CG works on 'credentials' - 
  crypographically provable claims about things - merchant offering 
  a good for sale (with digital signature on the offer), person's 
  Know Your Customer details, etc. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
James Dailey:  Does the Credentials CG get into biometrics?
Manu Sporny:  Only in that we want to reuse it.
Manu Sporny:  The Credentials CG is narrowly-focused -- it's 
  about being able to prove that one entity made claims about 
  another entity.
Manu Sporny:  Examples of credentials are passports, driver's 
  licenses, proofs of age, etc. it could be retinal scans, etc.
Manu Sporny:  So we're talking about the credential container 
  format and how to verify it.
Manu Sporny:  For example, in the future if you're doing some 
  critical govt work, and they'd do a palm vein scan on you, and 
  they'd digitally sign it and give that to you and you could give 
  that credential to get access to some secure website.
James Dailey:  Makes sense, and you're one step above the actual 
  id verification.
James Dailey:  In Uganda or other nations without certain kinds 
  of ID we're looking at if we can use things like photos from a 
  smartphone, etc. to build an identity iteratively.
James Dailey:  I wanted to understand where you were with that.
Manu Sporny:  On Tuesdays we have Credential CG calls and we have 
  members such as ETS participating.
Manu Sporny:  The use case you just outlined is a very important 
  use case that we're actively pursuing. We believe we have tech 
  for this. 3rd parties could create identity credentials for you 
  and the only thing that matters is that the consumer has to trust 
  the NGO or for-profit company that created the credential in the 
  first place. You can use multiple different decentralized 
  credentials to do KYC.
Manu Sporny:  You can mix and match and put different creds 
  together.
James Dailey:  Great, thanks.
Manu Sporny:  We've had a number of people say we shouldn't focus 
  on identity because it could be a quagmire, etc. and that's 
  another reason it was spun off into its own group.
Manu Sporny: 
  https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/#timeline
Evgeny Vinogradov:  Is JSON the only message format that can be 
  used? Or can it be extended to use XML for example?
Manu Sporny:  You could argue that RDF XML could be used, but 
  right now there's no XML stack. We made this decision early on 
  and we want Web devs adopting this technology and XML isn't 
  something that Web devs, in general, tend to like. There 
  certainly are XML-based APIs that exist, and we could talk about 
  XML, and certainly it's used for backend clearing like 
  ISO-(swift) but that's really for backend clearing, etc.
Evgeny Vinogradov:  I'm not sure its a problem, just wanted to 
  mention that other formats may be desired/want to be discussed.
Manu Sporny:  Sure, the banking industry is very XML-driven and 
  just getting into JSON. It may be a point of contention. We tried 
  to develop a tech stack that Web devs would get excited about and 
  XML isn't something like that.
Manu Sporny:  We should have an in-depth discussion at TPAC.
Manu Sporny:  We dont' address the XML stack and it could be a 
  big problem and if we want to use XML we have to bring in a whole 
  other tech stack, signatures, XML processor, etc.
Manu Sporny:  Here's what we can say is that people *can* use RDF 
  XML but I don't think anyone wants to do that.
Manu Sporny:  If we're using Semantic Web linked data technology, 
  then XML doesn't really let that happen other than RDF XML and 
  the developer community has railed against that, it's very 
  disliked.
Manu Sporny:  We should discuss it; the other thing we don't want 
  to have happen is that the banking community might run away if it 
  doesn't say XML.
Dave Longley:  One thing that might help is to front-run - this 
  is the front-end stack of technologies. Backend clearing can 
  still use XML - we're trying to achieve interoperability at 
  front-end right now, not back-end as well. [scribe assist by Manu 
  Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  One possibility is that a bank runs this software 
  to do payment initiation and digital receipts, but then they'd 
  use ISO202122 [?]for backend clearing that they already have 
  implemented.
Manu Sporny: 
  https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/#timeline
Manu Sporny:  On this time scale we're about 60-90% complete on 
  the first three items. We need to update http sigs and push it 
  through the process we're like 90% done. We just need to update 
  RDF normalization spec to the latest version and put it through a 
  W3C group, they are basically just waiting on us to say when we 
  should start that work.
Manu Sporny:  We're probably 70% of the way through the Web 
  Commerce spec, but only 20% of the way through Web Commerce API, 
  we want a polyfill for it and want browsers to eventually 
  implement but can't count on it.
Manu Sporny:  I don't think the timeline really expresses that 
  information.
Dave Longley:  You could put some in-line progress bars. [scribe 
  assist by Manu Sporny]
Evgeny Vinogradov:  A good idea would be to point to boxes that 
  can be developed in parallel.
Evgeny Vinogradov:  We can't easily tell from the picture
Manu Sporny:  Almost all of them can be done in parallel, really, 
  but we should make that more clear.
Manu Sporny:  Let's say we spun out a technical working group for 
  each blue block, they could all be done in parallel. They'd just 
  need to be synced up right at the end.
Manu Sporny:  Since we've got technical implementations of this 
  stuff we can integrate quickly.
Manu Sporny:  The thing I wanted to get away from was just having 
  all the blocks be aligned. They can all be done in parallel and 
  it would just look like a big stack.
Manu Sporny:  Maybe we can say that all of them can start 
  together.
Dave Longley:  Maybe left-align them then the right sides become 
  a bit longer [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Evgeny Vinogradov:  Talk about dependencies.
Manu Sporny: 
  https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/#timeline
Manu Sporny:  I'll try another iteration and publish to the 
  mailing list and we can talk more next week after we've redone 
  the diagram.
Manu Sporny: 
  https://web-payments.org/specs/source/roadmap/#active-collaborators
Manu Sporny:  The last thing at the bottom of the roadmap are 
  active collaborators. We want to reach out to SWIFT and US Fed as 
  two examples, SWIFT is interested and keeping up to date and they 
  aren't sending anyone to participate, US Fed is assigning people 
  and are directly involved in the work. The latter group is listed 
  on here.
Manu Sporny:  These are the orgs that are making it part of their 
  mission to make Web Payments a success.
Manu Sporny:  We have technical groups on the left and policy 
  groups on the right and Open Payments Foundation in the middle 
  whose only purpose is to make these standard techs. The OPF is 
  there to create open source implementations of these 
  technologies.
Manu Sporny:  I didn't put all the orgs that fall under the W3C 
  umbrella, are there any other external orgs that should be on 
  here that we missed?
Manu Sporny: This is what the sister document looks like at 
  Credentials CG: 
  http://opencreds.org/specs/source/roadmap/#active-collaborators
Manu Sporny:  This is from the Credentials CG and here you'll 
  notice the Badge Alliance (a spin off from Mozilla) is in the 
  middle there too.
Manu Sporny:  They have been added because they are a different 
  consortium outside of W3C that are actively involved in this work 
  in creating badges for people.
Manu Sporny:  We're at the top of the hour, anything else to 
  discuss today?
Manu Sporny:  We have what should go into the CG presentation at 
  TPAC, we'll float that out to the other CG members and get 
  feedback, and then we're ready for TPAC.
Manu Sporny:  Any other thoughts or concerns, things to deal with 
  before TPAC?
No other thoughts, meeting adjourned.

Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2014 16:20:02 UTC