Manu Sporny: Let's get the administrivia out of the way ✪
Manu Sporny: We skipped last week, because all were so busy, but we have a number of things to get up to speed with this week. ✪
Manu Sporny: Update on Open Badges release, Groningen Declaration Meeting, WebAppSec API update, Gates Foundation released Level 1 project which touches credentials stuff a bit. Credentials WG charter will be discussed in NYC -- it's on the agenda; Next steps: Selecting a new chair for the group to lead us into the WG work, figuring out priorities for the next few weeks. ✪
Richard Varn: I'm a distinguished presidential appointee, leading the credentials initiative for ETS ✪
Richard Varn: Has been a legislator, CIO for a state, city, federal projects, and a university, and has worked in his own consulting practice. IT development projects for 35 years. Intersection of policy, law, technologies. On credentials, has been working on how credentials break things apart. ✪
Manu Sporny: We're hoping over the next couple weeks to bring Richard up to speed in the group and get him prepped so that when the Credentials WG is set up, he could assume the role of chairing that group, along with a co-chair TBD ✪
Manu Sporny: Richard has a long history of work in the credentials space. ✪
Brian Sletten: "I was a legislator" = 11 years as a Senator! Wow. Welcome, Richard. ✪
Manu Sporny: Richard, who you are most likely to be working with closely is gkellogg -- in the role of W3C staff contact. ✪
Manu Sporny: NateOtto from Concentric Sky, Badge Alliance ✪
Manu Sporny: Bsletten long time Linked Data/ REST expert, who speaks to thousands upon thousands of developers each year ✪
Nate Otto: Here's a quick rundown of the 1.1 release - we've adapted open badges to be a Linked Data format in JSON-LD - w/o losing backwards compat for 1.0 - people can start issuing open badges as Linked Data credentials. ✪
Nate Otto: As this group moves forward, Badge Alliance wants to stay aligned and work on a 2.0 credential - may break backwards compat to align credentials with this group. ✪
Nate Otto: We're looking into important features in badging space - interested in issuing Linked Data badges. ✪
Brian Sletten: Have you had feedback yet on the changes? Has the community shown interest/concerns? ✪
Nate Otto: The process of moving to 1.1 was long - started investigating in early June of last year - talked to issuer platforms, users, foundations, funders about what they needed. ✪
Nate Otto: Also talked to Linked Data experts in this group - not much since Friday, but hoping that lots of devs that are involved will start building it into their platform soon. ✪
Nate Otto: Concentric Sky is going to be releasing an issuing platform that will be supporting Linked Data features - reference implementation of 1.1 - Kerri and I are available for those that want to ask questions state concerns. ✪
Brian Sletten: I speak to developers about this stuff all the time - interested in seeing how devs react. This is now public? ✪
Nate Otto: Yes, the announcement is public. Mozilla runs the most important badge service platform - badge validator that's important - they'll update to 1.1 in near future as well as several other issuing platforms. Will keep reporting back. ✪
Nate Otto: Hoping to show off cool new features wrt. Linked Data that we're going to offer. ✪
Manu Sporny: I always have a hard time saying that word ✪
Manu Sporny: Right now is the Groningen Declaration meeting. This is the EU's initiative to do portable credentials. Sunny Lee is there representing Badge Alliance, and Eric Korb is there representing Accreditrust. Both of them are representing the Credentials CG work. ✪
Manu Sporny: The Groningen group is essentially trying to do the same work we are trying to do in the education space. ✪
Manu Sporny: This group seems to be made up of many IT folk ✪
Manu Sporny: We are working on pushing them to use open standards ✪
Manu Sporny: I'm sure we'll get an update from Sunny and Eric when they get back. ✪
Topic: WebAppSec Credential Management API Status Update
Manu Sporny: WebAppSec group at W3C published something they were calling a Credentials Managment API. It is really a password management API, in the sense that we understand credentials. ✪
Manu Sporny: We objected to it being published in its original form, had a discussion with the chairs and editors of that group to ensure they at least put in reference to our work; they did, and we took our objection out of the way. ✪
Manu Sporny: What they are trying to do is store and retrieve credentials in ther API ✪
Manu Sporny: The chair of the group is on the Google Chrome team, and another representative works for Mozilla. ✪
Manu Sporny: We're trying to fast track our credentials through this other group. If we can get them to extend their API in a fairly trivial way, it would mean that credentials could become a part of core browsers, and 1-1.75B people could get access to credentials immediately. This is 3 years before we thought this would happen. ✪
Manu Sporny: But, it means we have a lot of quick work to do. dlongley and I need to sit down and propose an API modification to them. I know they are willing to listen, we don't know how much they are willing to change the API. ✪
Manu Sporny: The biggest issue with the currently proposed API is that it has a belief that cross-origin credentials is not a design goal for the spec that they're working on. (Which means that the only crednetials that matter to them are the ones issued to you by the site you're viewing) ✪
Manu Sporny: (You couldn't have Amazon issue you a crednetial and then use it on another site) ✪
Manu Sporny: For educational credentials, for example, you need cross-origin credentials. This group, the Credentials CG, is interested in cross-origin credentials. (For example, you get a credential from Harvard and use it to apply to a different grad school) ✪
Manu Sporny: Because this philosophical disctintion was rejected, it is unlikely that WebAppSec will be interested ✪
Manu Sporny: We'll have to have this discussion with WebAppSec at some point. ✪
Nate Otto: Quick technical clarification - in how you and Dave are imagining a cross-origin API - when a website requests a generic credential - then user assents to send the college degree over from univ. - requests credential from credential vault - does credential vault transmit directly to website? [scribe assist by Manu Sporny] ✪
Manu Sporny: This is the Level One project just announced by B&MGF to help 1billion+ people world wide who don't have access to banking infrastructure (savings account, checking accounts, etc.) ✪
Manu Sporny: Credentialing is crucial for the poor to assist with Know Your Customer (KYC) initiatives at banks. ✪
Manu Sporny: People must be able to walk into banks, but if there is no nearby bank, chances are there won't be, so they remain cut off for loans, savings, etc. ✪
Manu Sporny: Meeting I had with them (B&MGF) included people from LibreOffice, Google Summer of Code, Xen Hypervisor, etc. looking for open source solutions to this need. There is also overlap with the educational goals of the B&MGF. ✪
Manu Sporny: Mobile phone is the key technology to enabling these tools. ✪
Nate Otto is scribing.
Manu Sporny: The idea is to try to make this happen, through mobile phones ✪
Manu Sporny: This group cares about this, because the way that a lot of these credentials will be issued is through the mobile phone sellers ✪
Manu Sporny: This would be like one stall in a market, where the seller can take a thumbprint and issue the credential ✪
Manu Sporny: Any questions on Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Level One Project? ✪
Manu Sporny: The status is that they're interested in all these things, and have just launched it out of stealth mode. They brought us in for a quick sanity check right before launch. ✪
Manu Sporny: Next steps: they're probably going to set up a foundation to take care of the technical aspects of it ✪
Manu Sporny: Costa (sp?) is connected with us. He created the Swiss network that clears millions of transactions a month. Now he's trying to solve a different sort of payment routing problem. ✪
Manu Sporny: We are currently trying to work with them to see how W3C and Gates Foundation can work more closely together. ✪
Manu Sporny: US Fed Faster Payments task force as well ✪
Manu Sporny: That collaboration will definitely impact the work that we're doing here. It will impact the technology we have to create in v1 of credentials, as well as the use cases and requirements. ✪
Topic: Credentials WG Charter on Web Payments Agenda
Manu Sporny: We've been negotiating a place for the Credentials WG Charter (which was created in this group as a proposed charter to create an official WG). We have around 2hrs of official agenda discussion time on the Web Payments face2face in NY next month. ✪
Manu Sporny: There is room for non-w3c members to join on the last day, but they are pretty much booked solid. ✪
Manu Sporny: This is important for us, because the Web Payments group is the one that's going to bat for us to support our efforts to become an official WG. ✪
Manu Sporny: Make sure you take a very careful look at that charter, because it's what's going up in front of that membership in June. They'll hack at it a bit, then send it to us for approval. Then it will go up for a general W3C membership vote. We must get a minimum of 5% of that membership to support us, we're aiming for more like 15%. ✪
Manu Sporny: By June/July/August, recruiting should be wrapping up ✪
Richard Varn: That's a 2 day meeting. When will we know what part of the meeting we're in? ✪
Manu Sporny: I imagine it will be in the first day, but not confirmed. The order of the agenda is in order that people want to hit things, and we currently appear early, but they may reorganize it in the next week or two. ✪
Manu Sporny: Gkellogg, I don't think we're going to try to get you out there for this one, because it'll only be 1-2 hrs, but... backing up: The Charter will be reviewed and refined, then it will go up for a vote around September. If the charter is approved, we need to have ~3 telecons between then and the Face to Face in Sapporo in October. We're hoping to have a foundation set up with funding to make sure you can travel, gkellogg ✪
Gregg Kellogg: If it makes sense for me to be on an audio link for the Web Payments face2face, I could do that. manu: We'll see and will let you know. ✪
Manu Sporny: One last thing: the assumption behind the creation of the working group is that we have enough organizations to actively participate in the work. We have the level of activity that we need for active participation to transition to a WG, but we also need a larger number of organizations who will pledge to join W3C and support the work, so that we can convince W3C this is ready for WG level instead of Interest Group ✪
Manu Sporny: We have to get these vision documents prepped, so that when we go out to recruit organizations to join W3C, and recruit support among W3C membership, that they will be aligned with what we want to happen. ✪
Topic: Next Steps
Manu Sporny: If a large org W3C member jumps in and says "actually we want something else for crednetials", that could derail the work (and would be worse without good support behind us from our recruiting efforts. ✪
Manu Sporny: As I said when we started this group, I did not intend to be running the calls for this long. We need folks from larger organizations to step in to lead the work. We have an elections cycle. The current person who's running the group steps down and calls for elections. People put their names into the ring, we vote, and a new chair takes over. ✪
Manu Sporny: Hopefully, having heard Richard's background, you agree that he would be a good fit. And he's interested! ✪
Richard Varn: A contact for the credentialing (badges) work at Pearson is Peter Janzow. ✪
Manu Sporny: I will take an action to contact Peter ✪
ACTION: Manu to contact Peter Janzow at Pearson about co-chairing W3C Credentials Working Group.
Manu Sporny: As a reminder, just because a group elects a set of chairs, that doesn't mean the W3C won't step in and make a different recommendation/decision ✪
Manu Sporny: Next: the priorities for the next few weeks. ✪
Manu Sporny: 1) We need to get the use cases document into better shape ✪
Manu Sporny: 2) The executive summary is in good shape, but please take a look at it ✪
Manu Sporny: The use cases doc is the one where we need the most work right now. We also need to create the support questionaires so we can ask orgs to take a look at the executive summary and let us know if they are going to vote in favor of the work. ✪
Manu Sporny: Q: are there any other work items that people can think of? ✪
Brian Sletten: You, Sunny, Nate and I were going to think of parallelizing the work on the use cases. The meeting never happened. ✪
Kerri Lemoie: I can join the use cases meeting as well. ✪
Brian Sletten: "Any time after next Tuesday would work for me" ✪
Manu Sporny: We'll all take a pass through the use cases doc this week, come up with some ideas on parallelizing it, have a discussion about it next week, and then move forward ✪
Manu Sporny: Anything else we should be working on for the next month? ✪
Manu Sporny: I think that's it for the call today. ✪
Manu Sporny: Thanks everyone for the call this week. Same bat time, same bat channel next week. ✪