WPWG Chairs and Staff (was Re: Update on Web Payments Working Group)

Hey Melvin, I wanted to respond to a number of your insightful comments
as well as those made by the rest of the group to reassure that all
isn't as bad as it may seem.

We do have a plan of how to proceed based on where we are today and that
plan doesn't involve "giving up".

I'm breaking the responses up into separate threads to focus on each
issue separately.

On 04/04/2016 06:49 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> I feel particularly let down by the W3C staff and chairs

To speak in defense of the current Chairs of the Web Payments Working
Group - they're doing everything they can to balance the many players in
the group and they are listening and reacting appropriately.

Nick Telford-Reed has spoken publicly at the W3C Advisory Committee
Forum about how the approach taken thus far was a bad idea:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments-ig/2016Mar/0070.html

Adrian Hope-Bailie, who was involved in the Web Payments Community Group
before he went to work for Ripple, and who continues to stay engaged
with this group has also acknowledged the difficulties in the current
group. He recently pulled in the Web Payments CG's Web Payments HTTP API
specification into the proposals under consideration by the Web Payments WG:

https://github.com/w3c/webpayments/pull/115

So, the Chairs of the WPWG are listening and are attempting to be
responsive and have recently pulled in one of this groups specs for
discussion.

As for the W3C staff, I think they've tried to stay as neutral as
possible and we can't expect them to have that much influence over
multi-billion dollar multinational corporations. Remember, the W3C
membership pays the W3C staff to execute on the W3C Process and in this
particular case, no W3C Process issues have been violated. So, I don't
think pointing at the W3C staff will have any effect as they're
effectively powerless wrt. the browser vendors unless the browser
vendors violate W3C process.

The real issue is that we have two of the largest companies in the world
with 62% market share, and they don't have to listen to anyone.

Even if everyone in the Web Payments WG were to vote in favor of a
particular path, and the browser vendors didn't want to take that path,
then the rest of us have no option. We can't convince the browser
vendors to do something that they don't want to do. Similarly, the
browser vendors can't convince the rest of the world to implement
something that they don't want.

To be clear, both browser vendors have said that they do want input from
this group on their specs. It's up to us to cautiously take them at
their word and follow through with that and try to shape the current
proposal with something that is more in line with the consensus of this
group.

There are currently 61 issues that are open on the Browser Payment API spec:

https://github.com/w3c/browser-payment-api/issues

Anyone in this group has been invited to comment on those issues or open
ones of their own. If those of you want to participate in the
development of the Browser Payment API spec, this would be one good way
of engaging in that work.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Web Browser API Incubation Anti-Pattern
http://manu.sporny.org/2016/browser-api-incubation-antipattern/

Received on Tuesday, 5 April 2016 20:25:40 UTC