Re: Presentation to Web Payments IG

Replies inline with [JRP]:

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> 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?
>

[JRP]:  Understood, through I probably didn't express well what I actually
meant, as I attempt to match the phrasing of the others. Without being
insistent, let me try suggest  another way to say what I had in mind...

ADD: Roles - insufficient payments control by transacting parties

What I'm trying to raise is the sticker-shock experienced when finding out
the final price of a foreign currency purchase on the transactions
statement issued by the intermediary. Fees and percentages are generally
not known ahead of time, and can't easily be discovered after the fact.



> > ***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?
>

[JRP]:  Yup, go with "Economic" I'd say.


>
> > ***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.
>

[JRP]:   No specific definition is fine. It's a fuzzy concept that should
not be boxed in.


> > ***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.
>

[JRP]:   Informally consulting with people from key organizations without
officially implicating the organization itself is both a legitimate and
surely even an expected modus operandi. Let's me thus borrow some phrasing
from a paragraph that was crafted in collaboration with "Communications
Branch" when I served a decade ago as both the official spokesperson for
the Canadian Goverment on free/libre/open source, and the co-coordinator of
an open informal community that met weekly at a local pub:
http://www.goslingcommunity.org/  (...btw, we still meet weekly! ;-)

My suggested new phrase is thus:

"Diverse sources experienced in central banking, commercial banking,
payments intermediaries, business, government, informally in their personal
capacities on the understanding that their ideas and views are independent
of the official stances of their current or former employers"

If someone asks for names, explain that informal peer review with insiders
doesn't come a  "he-said/she-said" official reporting arrangement.


> 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
>
> [JRP]:  Better -- my issue was with the word "technology" which says too
much an nothing at the same time. Better to short-list the classes of
deliverables.


> > *** 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
>
> [JRP]:  Understood -- I meant it really to say "Here are some of the
perspectives we have been taking into account as we worked on this through
the GC".  So I meant this sort of an informal bibliography. The purpose
being to show that we've been seeing our effort within the broader context
of all these other entities and activities around us. Its an
acknowledgement function too. It's to say explicitly that we've taken a
big-picture approach.  Maybe that's the heading: "We've taken a big-picture
approach".


> 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/
>
>


-- 
Joseph Potvin
Operations Manager | Gestionnaire des opérations
The Opman Company | La compagnie Opman
jpotvin@opman.ca
Mobile: 819-593-5983