Web Payments Telecon Minutes for 2014-12-03

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/2014-12-03/

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

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Web Payments Community Group Telecon Minutes for 2014-12-03

Agenda:
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2014Dec/0000.html
Topics:
  1. Scaling Teleconferences Back
  2. Web Payments IG Update
  3. Planning for next several months
  4. Release of Payswarm Source Code
Chair:
  Manu Sporny
Scribe:
  Dave Longley
Present:
  Dave Longley, David I. Lehn, Manu Sporny, Brent Shambaugh
Audio:
  https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-12-03/audio.ogg

Dave Longley is scribing.
Manu Sporny:  Agenda for today is light - just updates and future 
  planning. The other thing we may want to put on the agenda is 
  talking about the release some of digital bazaar's source code as 
  a commercial product and to discuss a way to allow contributors 
  to the project to revenue share, etc.
Manu Sporny:  Any other changes?
None

Topic: Scaling Teleconferences Back

Manu Sporny:  There are currently four calls around web payments 
  that are going on every week. The CG, IG, IG Use Cases Task 
  Force, IG payment agent task force.
Manu Sporny:  All four of those are going on every week and we 
  may want to scale these CG calls back particularly because we 
  don't have as much attendance on these calls.
Manu Sporny:  We could scale back to once a month.
Dave Longley:  Once per month for Web Payments CG call is enough. 
  [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  Of course we can always call for another meeting at 
  any point if we feel that's necessary.
Manu Sporny:  Ok, let's do these once per month from now on. Most 
  of the work will shift to Web Payments IG.

Topic: Web Payments IG Update

Manu Sporny:  Currently there are multiple streams of work going 
  on in the Web Payments IG. This is good, good discussion, good 
  competent people and everyone excited about the work. We've got 
  folks from Deutsche Telekom, World Bank, W3C, DB, etc. people who 
  have been involved w/W3C a long time and new members.
Manu Sporny:  We have three major task forces in IG. I'm heading 
  up Use Cases Task Force, the purpose is to create a Use Cases 
  document. We've taken the CG Use Cases doc and handed it over to 
  them to seed the work. We've got ISO 20022 use cases as well.
Manu Sporny:  A new standard 12812 coming out of X9 and some 
  other use cases from X9.
Manu Sporny:  All these docs are getting integrated into a single 
  Use Cases doc. We have those calls Thurs 9am EST, only W3C 
  members may join the calls. The other task force is the Payment 
  Agent task force. The Agent is a piece of software that runs 
  payment activities for you on the web. Parallel to the User Agent 
  (browser). The point is to figure out the basic architecture for 
  the Payment Agent, what it does what it can access, etc. Two docs 
  will be created from the task forces and fed into the roadmap doc 
  which will talk about status of payments on the Web. The roadmap 
  doc will also demonstrate what the IG thinks is possible, where 
  the gaps are and what can be done.
Manu Sporny:  There is at least one more task force of interest. 
  The Glossary Task Force's purpose is to make sure the language is 
  aligned with the industry, we aren't inventing new terminology or 
  if we are we put it somewhere so people know what we're talking 
  about. So, everything is moving well in the IG, people are 
  motivated, we're hoping to get some docs out in Q1 in 2015.
Manu Sporny:  Those will be first public working drafts.
Manu Sporny:  That's an update from the Web Payments IG, any 
  questions?
None

Topic: Planning for next several months

Manu Sporny:  Now that the IG is up and running, what should the 
  CG do? Certainly it an help review the Use Cases and docs and all 
  the things IG is working on, but we should also be focusing on 
  some technical stuff as well. We moved the credentials work to 
  another CG, we didn't want a distraction or people wouldn't care 
  as much as it, etc. In hindsight, it's funny because the 
  credentials CG has tons of interest lots of people working on 
  things. The opposite of what was predicted is happening.
Manu Sporny:  That CG is very active.
Manu Sporny:  The credentials work will continue to happen in the 
  Credentials CG, the question is what we do here to increase 
  activity. We do have to talk about RDF Dataset Normalization. The 
  credentials group is almost to the point that the RDF Dataset 
  Normalization should be pushed to official W3C work. We did have 
  a discussion w/one of the W3C staff contacts on a mailing list 
  about digital signatures, etc. and there may be further 
  discussion there. This CG can play a supporting role related to 
  that, but either way that work will continue.
Manu Sporny:  Are there any ideas on what the CG should be 
  focusing on primarily over the next couple of months?
Dave Longley:  I think work items that we have in the charter are 
  all relevant, all of those things will be discussed in the IG. We 
  can be semi-reactive to IG - fill in gaps in technology/ideas, 
  put that information into the group. [scribe assist by Manu 
  Sporny]
Dave Longley:  Follow what the IG is doing, feed information into 
  that group. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny:  One of the things that makes it really difficult is 
  that the IG has a week delay on when their minutes are approved. 
  So it's been difficult to let the CG know what's been going on. 
  It's not a big deal in the long term, but by the time the CG 
  reads the minutes, the IG has already moved on from the 
  discussion. There's new stuff that has happened since then, so 
  coordination may be hard. But I agree we could be semi-reactive 
  to what's going on there.
Manu Sporny:  The commerce spec, the WebDHT stuff, etc. things 
  that no one has picked up yet.
Manu Sporny:  Fully decentralized version of identity credentials 
  over the Web, but the credentials CG will be working on that.
Manu Sporny:  We might want to talk about the source code stuff. 
  I think it's fine to be reactive to the IG right now until they 
  get a more stable direction on where they want to go. We could 
  just make sure the CG is aware of the discussions the IG is 
  having, copy/paste to the mailing list so people know what's 
  going on.
Brent Shambaugh:  If we meet every month we'll be able to 
  consolidate the last three weeks, which will help
Manu Sporny:  Maybe if the calls are only monthly that's less of 
  a big deal.
Brent Shambaugh:  They'll be publishing minutes about what 
  they've talked about?
Manu Sporny:  Kind of like the minutes we publish but not as 
  clean/pretty, but there is a log of what was discussed.
Brent Shambaugh:  Is it structured like a CG but just different 
  people?
Manu Sporny:  It's very like how we operate here, yes. They don't 
  record the audio like we do here. But everything else is 
  basically run like we do in this group. Everyone there is from a 
  company that is from the financial industry or is an implementor, 
  so there are more industry professionals in that group.
Manu Sporny:  So the general plan is to be reactive to IG's needs 
  and the people in the IG can post as much as they can (once 
  released) from the IG to the CG mailing list.
Manu Sporny:  Any other comments?
None

Topic: Release of Payswarm Source Code

Manu Sporny:  We've been talking about this internally at Digital 
  Bazaar for a while now. We want to make a reference 
  implementation available so people can hack on things and test 
  things out and that's hard to do if you have to build the whole 
  thing from scratch. So we've been talking about possibly 
  releasing source code. If we do this, a big if, we'll release 
  under a commercial license, it's all DB's intellectual property 
  but people can look at the source but DB retains all rights. That 
  would be stage 1, stage 2 could be that we allow non-commercial 
  use of the platform, so for anyone who wants to develop or test 
  an idea out, or propose an update to the specs but needs an 
  implementation they can use the platform to do that. If the 
  entity/org/person isn't profiting off of the source code then 
  they can use it. Stage 3 might be a profit-sharing mechanism. We 
  want anyone that develops on this code to get paid for doing so. 
  We think that's the healthiest way towards a good ecosystem and 
  healthy platform. A certain percentage of revenue made by the 
  software goes back into the community. Meaning if a dev adds a 
  new feature to the product and a license deal occurs later then 
  some of that revenue goes back to the developer -- where that dev 
  doesn't have to work at DB, they can be self-employed, work at 
  another company, etc.
Manu Sporny:  The idea is to create some kind of revenue sharing 
  mechanism with the platform. Who knows where we're going from 
  there.
Manu Sporny:  We want to do smart contracts at some point, in the 
  group, and we want to dogfood the smart contract stuff, and if 
  we're going to do that, we should do that on the core platform, 
  the reference implementation. In the future, the way that devs 
  end up getting paid will be that the payments are run through the 
  platform and the percentages for who gets paid what would be 
  split up through a smart contract. A program will pay people 
  instead of some human run process.
Manu Sporny:  That's the proposal of an idea we're playing around 
  with right now.
Brent Shambaugh:  [Missed] has been allowing different people to 
  get paid when working on a project when they aren't directly 
  working for the companies behind the projects.
Brent Shambaugh:  What about other things with people gaming the 
  system, people are too humble/meek, etc. I guess it would really 
  need to be established, before hand or something, how much 
  something is actually worth.
Manu Sporny:  Yes, that's what we've been grappling with, and if 
  we do this, we'd be doing this in a staged approach because it 
  may be hard to get right.
Manu Sporny:  A really simple approach is adding/removing lines 
  of source are worth some percentage of revenue, but perhaps too 
  simple. The only way to track stuff is to look at lines of source 
  committed added/removed. The other things like documentation, 
  evangelizing the product, etc. are all valuable things but are 
  more difficult to handle to begin with. We can reevaluate the 
  algorithm every year to try and make sure people are compensated 
  for things like that but it will take stages/work to figure out 
  how to do it properly. Like the payments work, when we started 
  this work everyone was saying it would be too hard, no one will 
  join the work, etc. but we've made tons of progress in that area. 
  We think the smart contract stuff is going to work as well, and 
  trying to integrate it into the core part of our work may help.
Manu Sporny:  We're hoping to pull the community group into the 
  discussion and start out naively and see how far we get (if we 
  decide to do this).
Manu Sporny: http://www.sensorica.co/
Manu Sporny:  What we're trying to do is seed the community group 
  with technology to talk about and we're trying to make sure that 
  the CG folks get something out of it, a financial reward out of 
  participating rather than the typical open source thing where 
  other companies mostly benefit from that vs. the contributors 
  getting paid. Not that we have anything against open source, we 
  have plenty of open source libs and use it, but we'd like to 
  reward people for working on financial software.
Manu Sporny:  Any other comments?
None
Brent Shambaugh:  I've been working on my own Use Cases; I 
  reviewed a lot of payment companies back in March, I came up with 
  a few new things.
Manu Sporny:  If you've got new ones let us know because we're 
  integrating in the IG right now.
Manu Sporny:  Next call will be in January, first or second week.

Received on Friday, 16 January 2015 17:39:58 UTC