The W3C Credentials Community Group

Verifiable Claims and Digital Verification

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Credentials CG Telecon

Minutes for 2015-07-21

Agenda
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2015Jul/0019.html
Topics
  1. Introduction to Andrew
  2. Introduction to John Tibbetts
  3. Recruiting
  4. Vision
  5. Glossary
  6. Use Cases
  7. Capabilities
  8. Roadmap
Organizer
Kim Hamilton Duffy, Christopher Allen
Scribe
Gregg Kellogg, Nate Otto
Present
Gregg Kellogg, Manu Sporny, Andrew Rosen, John Tibbetts, Eric Korb, Nate Otto, Brendan Benshoof, Brent Shambaugh, Sunny Lee, David I. Lehn, Rob Trainer, Laura Fowler
Audio Log
Gregg Kellogg is scribing.
Manu Sporny: Intro to new folks, update on recruiting, then go into documents: vision, glossary, use cases, capabilities, and road map.

Topic: Introduction to Andrew

Andrew Rosen: I’m a PhD student at Georgia State. I’m interested in distributed hash tables.
Manu Sporny: We think we’re going to have quite a bit of work to do with distributed hash tables for discovery.
… We’re hoping that Brendan and Andrew will be able to help us out.

Topic: Introduction to John Tibbetts

John Tibbetts: I’m an independent, working with different enterprises; ususally in systems integration. In the last decade working exclusively in higher education.
… I’m active with IMS global, who adopted JSON-LD some time ago. We have a number of integration facilities and standards activities based on JSON-LD.
… One of the groups is tools interoperability; the predomenant way of integrating different systems with digital asset providers.
… Some of the machinery for that is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth. We’re looking for beter ways to identify identitiy providers and so forth
Manu Sporny: Great to have one of the core people from IMS LTI here!

Topic: Recruiting

Manu Sporny: To get a W3C working group started, we need to demonstrate sufficient interest in the work.
… THis involves recuriting people to be sure that once the WG is chartered, it’s on a good path to success. Typically W3C does this, but since we’re eager to go, they’ve asked us to help.
Eric Korb: I’ve been working on the list and have sent out invites to all my contacts. I sent out 5 directly to individuals.
… I know that 4 of them say they’ve completed the process.
… I also sent out followup to some of the 100 other contacts, but I’m concerned that they’re getting stuck in SPAM.
… I don’t have access to the result of the survey.
… I’ve got a good template; if anyone would like to use it, I’d be happy to share.
Eric Korb: It would be nice to get access to the stats.
Manu Sporny: Not trying to keep it secret, but …
Eric Korb: I’ll update the summary spreadsheet.
Manu Sporny: Good news is that from yesterday, we have in 7 new responses, so we’re close to tipping over the 5% response W3CM would like.
… Supposedly, 5% of membership is enough, but they’d also like to see new members.
Eric Korb: I’ll send out another ping, but don’t want to pester people.
Manu Sporny: (Reviews recent responses from spread-sheet).
Nate Otto is scribing.
Manu Sporny: JP Morgan Chase, Citrix, Ingenico (sp) which does hardware based payment terminals--they're interested in being able to provide a credential at point of sale. That's good; the emails are being effective. If we can do this same kind of growth over the next two weeks within existing membership, wer're solid.
...Then we can turn our attention to new members
Manu Sporny: We have some contacts at IMS Global who can help do outreach as well.
Manu Sporny: In other news, we've found a W3C staff members who are very interested in championing this internally.
Manu Sporny: There is another employee who has been critical/roadblocking some of the work, and this other staff contact is goint to try to keep pushing it forward. In order for things to happen at W3C, you really need an internal champion, and it's good news to be chatting with this staff member.
Manu Sporny: So that's good news.
Nate Otto: Two updates - Concentric Sky - still taking deep look at tech [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: One engineer was concerned w/ new technologies to make it work. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: We will reach out to Manu soon. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: Reached out to Mozilla Foundation again, not sure they're going to push Mozilla as a company to support it. Concentric Sky is at least onboard for an Interest Group as well. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Nate Otto: CSky would support further investigation - would hope stuff passes engineering review this week. [scribe assist by Manu Sporny]
Manu Sporny: Adding this number of new technologies is a concern, but there isn't really another way around it. Happy to have more conversation.

Topic: Vision

Manu Sporny: Gregg, would you mind giving an update on the documents you've been working on?
Gregg Kellogg: Updating to respec, removing payment-specific stuff, went through use cases and roadmap to make basic updates to be compatible.
Gregg Kellogg: Vision document: waiting for dust to settle on Google Document shared editing space, then it can be moved over to ReSpec.
Manu Sporny: Big thanks to Shane who did the glossary in the Web Payments group -- benefitting from a lot of the work they have done there; stealing the work and using it here.
Gregg Kellogg: We may be able to do some magic referencing github issues, which will pull the issue description out of github
Gregg Kellogg: It's not hard; I've done it in a few other specs; it will probably involve creating some new issues for things that are inline in the documents now.
Manu Sporny: I've seen that Joe and Eric have been working on that vision document as well.
Manu Sporny: It's supposed to be a quick 1-2 pager to outline our vision for credentials on the web and around the world.
Manu Sporny: Eric, any comments on editing that you and Joe have been doing?
Eric Korb: Looking for feedback on what exactly are we calling it -- transforming, reinterpreting content from its original web payments context. Maybe we could continue to talk about it?
Manu Sporny: Do you want to dive into it during this call next week?
Eric Korb: That would be great.
Eric Korb: Only would do that presuming that other volunteers have a chance to take a look at it between now and then
Manu Sporny: Take a look at this by next tuesday and leave your comments in there so we can have a good discussion on it.
Eric Korb: Has anyone else had a chance to take a look at the vision document?

Topic: Glossary

Manu Sporny: We have a glossary now
Manu Sporny: It is modeled after the glossary in the web payments group. The Web Payments landscape is more complicated than credentials if possible. Each standard setting organization in payments has their own language. Had trouble referencing anything like "payee" without referencing a bunch of definitions (european, US, etc).
Manu Sporny: I have a feeling we'll hit some of the same problem here, but not as bad.
Manu Sporny: This terminology section is a live document. When terminology is used in another other document, its definition is pulled in automatically from the glossary. It's great, because people don't have to jump around; they can just stay in the same document, and everything is kept in sync.
Manu Sporny: Section 2 is terminology, section 3 is cross-references. The point of that is to say "this is what we mean by 'recipient', but maybe a different standard-setting body has a different definition. our definition is aligned to other definitions here, here, and here".
Manu Sporny: That's really all the glossary is meant to do, to help us get more accurate with the language we're using here as a group.

Topic: Use Cases

Manu Sporny: I was not able to touch the use cases doc at all in the last week.
Gregg Kellogg: Only updated terminology
Manu Sporny: A good 6-8hrs work to move this all over is needed.
Brendan Benshoof: How far are we supposed to push these use cases?
Manu Sporny: They're supposed to be comprehensive. What we've been doing in Web payments is define at a high level: "I want a pony", without describing exactly how you're giong to get that pony. Then group goes through to prioritize, decide if that is a use case that you really want to get into the document.
Manu Sporny: We have to be very narrowly focused in creating a working group. If we cast the net too wide, we run the risk of creating a permanent working group, which we don't want.
Manu Sporny: Please link to google doc of use cases
Manu Sporny: That's the content that needs to be moved over into the new format
Manu Sporny: You andrew and I could talk in more detail when we chat tomorrow, about editing & respec and all that.
Manu Sporny: Anything else on use cases?

Topic: Capabilities

Manu Sporny: Capabilities describe features we want the global credentials architecture to have.
Manu Sporny: They're a mixture of requirements and capabilities, derived from the use case
Manu Sporny: Progress is that the document exists, that it's hooked up to the terminology, now we just need to start filling out content.

Topic: Roadmap

Brendan Benshoof: I'm available to help with this now but I am nto sure how to start helping. if somebody could poke me outside this call?
Brendan Benshoof: ^ Capabilities
Manu Sporny: Whenever somebody makes a change to the repository, the website updates itself. Anything you see on the site is the latest thing that's published.
Gregg Kellogg: A workflow that has worked well for me in the CSV WG is to create pull requests from a feature branch for your changes.
Brendan Benshoof: +1 Pull requests
Gregg Kellogg: In many respects, we made use of the PRs even if it was immediately pulled by the author. GitHub is good at resolving issues with this workflow.
Gregg Kellogg: If you do have the ability, if you make the branch within the opencreds repository rather than within your own fork, it makes it easier for others to participate in it (who have write access as well)
Manu Sporny: We should adopt that work flow
Nate Otto: +1
Manu Sporny: Any objections to adopting pull requests? No. Ok, that will be the way we work.
Brendan Benshoof: There is a bit of learning curve with git. But for just text editing, you could even do it only in the github webui.
Manu Sporny: Back to the Roadmap... I haven't been able to touch that document at all. gkellogg ?
Manu Sporny: Still needs updating
Manu Sporny: We've made quite a bit of progress in the last week. At this point, it's just a bunch of grunt work to move text from google docs, then do a bunch of editing
Manu Sporny: After editors get the first set of text in there, we'll ask for reviews from the group.
Manu Sporny: Anything else to discuss today? Editors, try to get some text written this week so we can review next week. Send a ping out to the mailing list so people can review additions and share thoughts on this call next week.
Brent Shambaugh: Vint Cerf?
Eric Korb: I would bring everybody's attention to the video timothy posted to the group. A point about 30m in that is about exactly what we're doing.
Manu Sporny: We have good contacts to VInt Cerf and have briefly mentioned this to him, though he probably talks to 1000 people a month, so he might need a refresher. Great work, everybody, we might be able to piece together something we can act on based on Tim's post.
Manu Sporny: Thanks everyone for the call. Have a great week.