Re: Presentation to Web Payments IG

On 10/23/2014 06:25 PM, Joseph Potvin wrote:
> *** The Web Platform's Current Failures: Credentials - no
> standardized, verifiable 3rd party credentials Payment Initiation -
> no standard way to initiate payments Digital Receipts - no standard
> proof-of-purchase mechanism ADD: Roles - no standard on prerogatives
> of intermediaries vs transacting parties

-1 for now, I don't understand what that means. It sounds like something
that wouldn't be in W3C's mandate to standardize. Seems like more of an
UNCITRAL thing?

> ***Why is identity and payment important? CHANGE: Capitalistic TO:
> Operational [Reason: Not all countries/payees/payers of the world
> self-idenfity with a capitalistic model]

Operational is good. I also cycled through "efficient", "profitable",
"green", "non-wasteful", and finally ended up at "Economic":

https://github.com/web-payments/web-payments.org/commit/1651d26ab032b6e6327d7d9b6d4fb7ca1de3342c

"Economic" as in "justified in terms of profitability", where
"profitability" could be a net benefit to society. Increasing economic
output doesn't merely have to do with the production of money or goods,
but of well-being as well (for example, GNH vs. GDP/GNI).

Still not totally sold on the word, but I do like it a bit more than
"operational". What do you think?

> ***Focus & Priorities KUDOS FOR the "smart contracts" phrase [Hmm,
> did I just not notice it in earlier CG communications??]

We've had the concept of parameterized offers and smart contracts since
around 2011:

https://web-payments.org/specs/ED/use-cases/2011-10-20/#independent-distribution-and-pricing

https://web-payments.org/specs/ED/use-cases/2011-10-20/#separation-of-content-from-licenses

https://web-payments.org/specs/ED/use-cases/2011-10-20/#conditional-redistribution

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/web-commerce/#publishing-a-license

They're implemented via the PayeeRule mechanism, which "are typically
used to apply algorithmic formulas to the final price of a particular good":

https://web-payments.org/specs/source/vocabs/commerce.html#PayeeRule

that functionality has been around since late 2010/early 2011:

https://web-payments.org/specs/ED/vocabs/commerce/2011-01-09/#PayeeRule

All that said, we may be miscommunicating since we don't have a specific
definition for a "smart contract" yet and there are many such
definitions flying around this space wrt. Distributed Autonomous
Organizations and smart contracts.

> ***Where is Active Collaboration Happening? ADD: "Diverse
> professionals from central banking, commercial banking, payments
> intermediaries, business, government" [...to the box which references
> the US Federal Reserve.] [Some of us have been bringing in ideas from
> people who, for various reasons, are not able to participate directly
> "on behalf of" their institutions.]

An early draft of the image had something to that effect in there, but
we ended up removing it because we'd have to call out who those people
are and many of them don't want to be identified yet. So, it puts us in
a catch-22 situation.

If we say that we're working with folks in central banks/commercial
banking, then some bank exec / government official asks "Who exactly are
you working with?". We have two options:

The first is to give them a name, which results in that person being
dragged into a conversation with their organization that they weren't
ready to have yet.

The second is to not give them a name, at which point our credibility
vanishes under accusations of falsely purporting to work with
organizations where we can't identify a contact.

Rather than be generic on that slide, we stuck with being specific and
acquiring names that we can refer people to in each of those
organizations if participants want to know exactly who we're working with.

I'd be happy to put more organizations on there if we have a name in
each of those organizations that we can point to as actively
participating in this work.

> ***WPCG will support WPIG
> 
> Web Payments CG will provide CHANGE: "input technology" TO:
> "reference implementation software" to WPIG for consideration
> 
> Web Payments CG will continue to experiment with pre-standardization 
> payment CHANGE "technology" TO: "software"

-0.5, we don't just provide software. We provide use cases, roadmaps,
specifications /and/ software. Software input is typically viewed as the
"least helpful" for an IG, whose main output product are design
documents and use cases about how systems should be built. You do have a
point, though - technology doesn't capture what we're providing as
input, so I made this modification based on your comment:

https://github.com/web-payments/web-payments.org/commit/a70c97e6c4dc158881e92356bfc35fdf7da7913d

> *** ADD A FRAME: at the end listing the several dozen organizations
> beyond the W3C that this work intersects with. I forget where to look
> for that list. Let me know if you don't know what list I'm referring
> to and I'll track it down.

The Web Payments IG Agenda is going to cover these right before the Web
Payments CG presentation, so adding it would be redundant in this
particular instance:

http://www.w3.org/2014/04/payments/webpayments_charter.html#coordination

Thoughts?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/

Received on Friday, 24 October 2014 03:44:59 UTC