The W3C Credentials Community Group

Verifiable Claims and Digital Verification

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Credentials CG Telecon

Minutes for 2015-07-14

Agenda
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2015Jul/0015.html
Topics
  1. Introduction to Brendan Benshoof
  2. Recruiting
  3. Producing Documents
  4. Vision document
  5. Use Cases
  6. Capabilities
  7. Roadmap
Organizer
Kim Hamilton Duffy, Christopher Allen
Scribe
Gregg Kellogg
Present
Gregg Kellogg, Manu Sporny, Brendan Benshoof, Nate Otto, Eric Korb, Matt Stone, Brian Sletten, Andrew Rosen, Rob Trainer, David I. Lehn, Laura Fowler, Sunny Lee
Audio Log
Gregg Kellogg is scribing.
Manu Sporny: Brendan is joining us today, intro later.

Topic: Introduction to Brendan Benshoof

Brendan Benshoof: I've not been able to join [scribe assist by Andrew Rosen]
Brendan Benshoof: I’m a grad student at georga state university. I work on distributed hash tables and making them do things they weren’t intended for.
… You have a black box labeled that, and I think I might be the one to remove the magic from it.
Nate Otto: That would be cool if you could make some magic real, Brendan. Nice to meet you.
Manu Sporny: We hang out on the #ipfs chanel, and a number of folks there are interested in decentralized hash tables and have been talking about stuff there for a while.
… Hopefully, Blame will be able to join us and help us there, happy to have you!
… That will help us have deeper discussions about decentralized identifiers.

Topic: Recruiting

Manu Sporny: I’ve been busy for the last week, but have been invited to speak at the Federal Reserve’s payment symposium. It’s an invite-only event with core-finanical folk.s
… They’re specifically interested in W3C and credentials. That puts a lot of weight behind what we’re doing.
… That would allow us to get more recruits in from govt and finanical services.
Eric Korb: We’re working on a project with IMS global; we’re using the JSON-LD format for credentials to express an extended transcript.
… We expect to demonstrate a prototype at “educause” in november.
Nate Otto: EDUCAUSE conference in Indianapolis in October.
… Mark Leuba is the chair of that at IMS Global.
… That will come a multi-purpose issuer to sign such documents, and a spec for describing a transcript in JSON-LD.
… This includes many open-source projects to describe this.
… I’ve also been asked to talk to an IMS quarterly meeting on AUgust 17th.
Manu Sporny: These are great opportunities, but a bit late for W3C’s needs.
Eric Korb: I invited Credly to invite us, and will follow up.
Manu Sporny: There’s a punch-list of about 100 W3C members that it would be great if you could help follow-up on.
Nate Otto: I’ve talked with Concentric Sky, and we’re going to do a review and have an answer in a couple of days.
… Badge Alliance is similar and should be able to give them an opinion shortly and hopefully get them to join.
Matt Stone: I’ve started a discussion with some sales people on the aclaim team. Parson has several clients that might also be good fits.
Manu Sporny: We may want to get some things produced while we’re waiting on recruiting.

Topic: Producing Documents

Brian Sletten: I have some time to work on docs.
Manu Sporny: I think we need to get back to producing documents. We do need more recruiting, and we’re not there yet, but we have other things to do.
… It’s going to be hard to convince W3C at the beginning of August without 15 more organizations.
… We need 30-40 at a bare minimum.
… We have 18 out of 47 right now.
… At the bottom is a simple form for them to fill out, or a verbal yes is fine too.
Eric Korb: I just filled it out for Accreditrust.
Nate Otto: Concentric Sky needs a technical review, and will decide after that.

Topic: Vision document

Manu Sporny: In the mean time, the folks not recrutiting can help on documents.
… We don’t have one yet, but the payments group’s could be a model.
… The doc is a quick 1-2 page. Perhaps Accreditrust/Pearson could help with this, and it should be quick.
Nate Otto: By take the lead on this document, you mean creating a "vision document" for credentials based on the template that the Web Payments IG has?
… There’s a bit at the top: “Web Principles” that shouldn’t need to be re-stated.
… Choice in where to store credentials, etc.
Eric Korb: We can contribute.
Matt Stone: I’d like to help too.
Gregg Kellogg: I can help with ReSpec formatting, if you just have text.
Manu Sporny: RichardVarn will also help.
… Deadline, beginning of August.
Nate Otto: Beginning of August is good.
Brendan Benshoof: Pull requests are made for this
Gregg Kellogg: We should put a skeleton ReSpec file in github [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Gregg Kellogg: From practical experience, I find that working on feature branches for these types of things might work well. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny: What’s worked well is to work from a google-doc. At some point we’ll freeze it and move it over.
Gregg Kellogg: That's fine - but Github is designed for this sort of collaboration - but I don't want that to be a barrier - google doc, emails, whatever works for people, I'll edit. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: +1 Open Credentials
Manu Sporny: We’ve been talking about “Open Credentials”, but maybe “Web Credentials”, or just “Credentials”.
Matt Stone: +1 Open Credentials
Matt Stone: Or at least -1 Web Credentials :)
Manu Sporny: This is where the group keeps it specs: https://github.com/opencreds/website/tree/master/specs

Topic: Use Cases

Brian Sletten: I’ll move it over to ReSpec in the opencreds repo.
Manu Sporny: There are some comments to resolve.
Brian Sletten: I’ll tak a pass at encorporating the comments.

Topic: Capabilities

Nate Otto: Thanks, bsletten -- feel free to ask me too if you have any questions on on of my comments.
Manu Sporny: The WebPayments group came up with the concept of a “Web Payments Architecture”.
… A credential system should be able to … (as basic capabilities).
… In the payments group we broke them down into high-level groups. E.g., there is a core-security part, another is “trust and identity”.
… Everything else has to do with payments, we would probably have stuff specifically for credentials.
… We don’t have any conent for this yet, and it will be a good month of effort.
Brian Sletten: Would August be soon enough to get started?
Manu Sporny: A stub now would be good.
Matt Stone: I can help too.
Brendan Benshoof: I can help jump in too.

Topic: Roadmap

Manu Sporny: This document’s pretty old (but not terrible).
… The web payments group took a different approach.
… The purpose of the roadmap document is to be crystal clear about what a WG would work on.
… It should have a very narrow scope, and specific use cases, capabilities and documents to be produced within the group’s timeframe.
… This document tries to make this clear, and shows that there is a near-term end to the work.
… I suggest that we lay the roadmap out in a similar way to the Web Payments group, preserving our current diagrams.
… I’ll volunteer to align these two documents.
Eric Korb: Is there a way we can produce a document that shows the documents we need to produce?
Manu Sporny: That’s on today’s agenda.
… The roadmap will reference the documents the group will publish.
Gregg Kellogg: The group would specify the documents they want to create in the roadmap. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny: These documents help rally different groups together to go in a single direction.
… The goal for next week should be to have stub-documents set up for all of these documents, and get updates on progress.