Manu Sporny: On the agenda, running down the recruiting effort and updates on recruiting and the documentation assignments. We are hoping that the editors and authors of these documents are making progress incrementally. If we go a week and don't make progress, we'll want to know why and try to fix it. ✪
Topic: Recruiting
Manu Sporny: We do have some good updates on recruiting. ✪
Manu Sporny: The good news here is that we have a number of new folks that responded to the recruiting drive. Eric Korb sent out a number of emails last week and the week before and we 29 affirmatives now which is good. ✪
Manu Sporny: That's a strong feedback. That includes people we haven't really been working on. We have another 30 in the pipeline. ✪
Manu Sporny: W3C is now kicking off internal discussions because we got the numbers above 25. Two staff contacts are pushing this heavily inside of W3C. Discussions about whether this should be handled at TPAC. ✪
Manu Sporny: We are hitting some friction from the Security folks. They are concerned about people being tracked across websites (ignoring email as it is currently used). We are going to have to be prepared to deal with this and show them that we do care about security and that people are already being tracked. ✪
Manu Sporny: As of last week we have a number of new folks. Badge Alliance. Nate has verified they will be joining. We have Citrix. DQ Systems (John Foley is an ex-JP Morgan Chase individual). We have a yes from ETS. We have a yes from Pearson. Indiana University [several others] including Verisys. Eric and John are recruiting some other folks. ✪
Manu Sporny: We need a big fish for W3C. A big new member. They would like to see a new multi-billion dollar organization join specifically because of this work. ✪
Eric Korb: None other than what you've covered. People are giving me feedback about voting. Apparently a lot of them didn't get the original email. I don't know if I can find a billion dollar company, but if someone like Parchment comes on board, that would be good. ✪
Manu Sporny: That would be difficult to ignore. When I say a billion I really mean "hundred million". ✪
Manu Sporny: They don't really count as they come in at $8,000 a year. The official stance is the size doesn't matter but it is helpful to bring in large members that pay larger fees and deploy things at larger scale. ✪
Manu Sporny: The large companies that are already members, but if ETS and Pearson both went to the W3C and said, "This is incredibly important to us, why are you dragging your feet on this?" they should listen to you. ✪
Manu Sporny: We're in a much better position than we were a month and a half ago. There are people in the Web Payments group that are pushing back on fintech for the poor that requires a credentialing component which is useful as a pushback to the people who thwarted the credentials. ✪
Nate Otto: Concentric Sky and some others from the badging world are low-budget and new fees are a concern. ✪
Nate Otto: Would it be helpful to have people who were concerned about the finances fill out the form? ✪
Eric Korb: Yeah, there's no financial commitment to expressing interest. ✪
Manu Sporny: Yeah, "We're interested but are concerned about the money" is something we can take back to the W3C. ✪
Manu Sporny: Eric, you raised the point that we have a number of glossary terms that are old. ✪
Manu Sporny: Gregg took what we had and moved it over. I think Eric you've been working on one too and it would be great to move that over. ✪
Eric Korb: As we've been talking to people about this at a commercial level, we've been trying to use terms that everyone can understand. When I point them to the glossary document, there is some confusion. We're trying to differentiate between conversational (e.g. issuer) and what is more formally part of the spec technically. Those are the kinds of things we are trying to differentiate. ✪
Eric Korb: Whereas the term 'context' is an actual class in the spec as part of JSON-LD. Those are the kinds of clarifications I am trying to make. ✪
Eric Korb: It's gotten difficult to separate so I agree with Manu that we should combine them again. ✪
Gregg Kellogg: We might want to split this section into a couple of parts. If we say "issuer" in a spec that the term is highlighted and linked to show that when we use the same term everywhere we mean the same thing. Respec has a feature that we leverage for this glossary to include aliases and linking them to term definitions. We want to use those but perhaps break those into normative and informative terms. ✪
Matt Stone: This one term itself is easy to conflate from a technology perspective and conversational perspective. There are probably a dozen other terms that we struggle with internally. I think it probably bears some discussion on these topics to put a mark on what these terms mean when we use them. ✪
Manu Sporny: We've gone through this exercise in the Web Payments work. There are multiple players and standards organizations with different terms. It's been a pain getting everyone on the same page. We did learn that it was important not to split the terms up. There is a clear understanding of what the terms mean if there is one glossary with a set of normative terms. When we talk about things in an informative document or a technic ✪
Manu Sporny: What Gregg has done is create a programmatic glossary that we can link into all of our documents. If we use a term, the glossary will include that term and definition. We are set up to include the glossary in all of the documents. We just need to go in and hammer out all of the terminology. ✪
Manu Sporny: I suggest Eric finishes up his first pass on the glossary and then we move the more general terms into the Credentials CG glossary. Then we can bikeshed all of the definitions. ✪
Manu Sporny: Would there be any disagreement going in that direction? ✪
Eric Korb: Sure, we can collaborate and then we'll get it into the ReSpec format. ✪
Manu Sporny: Eric, you and Matt work on that in the next few days then ping us. ✪
Gregg Kellogg: Yeah, I can help with that. Let me know if there are more questions about the terms that are there. We can add the new terms and remove the old terms as they are replaced. ✪
Manu Sporny: Thanks, Gregg. Eric, do you think you'll be able to done with the pass on that document by the end of the week. ✪
Eric Korb: I will try to get it done before the next meeting. ✪
Manu Sporny: Eric, last week you said you wanted to spend some time talking about the vision document. Do you still want to do that? ✪
Eric Korb: I think it needs the same amount of treatment as we just did with the glossary. We should probably set up another call to have a conversation and let people dive in and edit it. ✪
Eric Korb: I am not sure if it is in the minutes who wanted to contribute to that. I'll set up another meeting so we can all make edits. ✪
Manu Sporny: I don't think we've made progress on the other documents in the last week. I think we can take the time to talk about the vision document. ✪
Manu Sporny: Matt, feel free to hack away at the document. ✪
Eric Korb: I have Gregg, Manu, and Matt collaborating on this. ✪
Manu Sporny: If you look at the goal section of the Executive Summary, I think those can be transferred over to the vision document. ✪
Eric Korb: We should likely be in "suggesting" mode. ✪
Manu Sporny: In the Web Payments group, we had a large vision document that ended up sounding like the Web. Rather than reiterate that stuff, we said, "We believe the system should be built on web principles, scaling, accessible, etc." That allowed us to condense a large portion of the document down into one section. We could then elaborate more on the things that were specific to what we were discussing. ✪
Manu Sporny: We can talk about the verifiability of a credential, privacy, how extensible is it.....etc. Those are the kinds of things we might like to elaborate on in the vision document. ✪
Manu Sporny: Do we want to take the goals in the Executive Summary and move them into the vision document? Would that be a good first draft? ✪
Eric Korb: I hear what you are saying and I think we do need to do a bit of a merge. I would like to know which elements are critical, required, what can we throw out just because they were in the Web Payments group.... what are the things that are required? Does this supplant the Executive Summary going forward? ✪
Manu Sporny: I don't think it supplants the Executive Summary yet. ✪
Gregg Kellogg: Notice that the status of the document is added automatically. ✪
Eric Korb: Could participants please introduce who is speaking until we recognize your voice? ✪
Scribe note: Long back and forth discussion with specific reference to document sections. ✪
Matt Stone: I think we should move the definitions of credentials and what they are to frame what they mean in our context should exist in the vision document. ✪
Manu Sporny: Someone asked if the Executive Summary goes away. I guess in this case, the vision document is an elaboration of the Executive Summary. ✪
Manu Sporny: Maybe we move the Executive Summary content into the vision document to elaborate it, but the Executive Summary stays as a one page summary. The vision document should stay relatively small still, but it is an elaboration on the Executive Summary. ✪
Eric Korb: That is fine. My point I wanted to make about credentials. The list of all the types of credentials could be infinite. We don't want too many adjectives in front. ✪
John Tibbetts: I think it is a good idea somewhere and early to innumerate a whole bunch of credentials once. And then lump them into a super term elsewhere. ✪
Eric Korb: I've been using the term "digital credential" because they are different that what we would use in paper. ✪
Eric Korb: What we put in the W3C document, should be generic. ✪
Manu Sporny: Eric, that is an important distinction, Eric. We don't want people thinking we are doing anything with paper credentials. ✪
Manu Sporny: There is a lifecycle involving the issuing, storage and management of a credential and then its consumption. The last bit that we've played around with is revocation which can go into the management bucket. Reflecting that in the vision document: we expect this to be world-wide, anyone can store and manage credentials and they can be passed on and revoked. We want to make sure that there as many issuers, storage engines, ✪
Manu Sporny: Then we can talk about the need for standards for the interoperability between the components, requesting credentials, etc. ✪