The W3C Credentials Community Group

Verifiable Claims and Digital Verification

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Credentials CG Telecon

Minutes for 2015-11-24

Dave Longley is scribing.
Manu Sporny: Any updates/additions to the agenda?
None

Topic: Introduction to Dan Burnett

Dan Burnett: Hi, everyone. I have a background background in speech recognition and have worked for a number of companies such as Nuance. I started working with W3C in '99 on voice XML, the standards related to it, etc. I've been doing work at W3C and IETF for a number of years now. Most recently I've been working on WebRTC where I'm one of the spec editors for the two primary specs. That's for my company, this group I'm personally interested in. I first heard about it a year ago. Just listening in I thought it was interesting and didn't have a chance to follow it. I'm independent now, I do my WebRTC work for a company but my participating here is as personal.
Dan Burnett: I'll set up a separate individual account with W3C in the future and join that way. Thank you to all of you, this is great work that the world really needs.
Manu Sporny: Thanks for joining us!

Topic: WPIG / Verifiable Claims After Action Review

Brian Sletten is scribing.
Manu Sporny: We had a proposal that we ran through the WP IG and W3C staff and a bunch of external companies not in this group to discuss creating a Task Force to see if they should pursue a group on Credentials, Verifiable Claims, etc. The conversation was yesterday and it went very well. We made the proposal to be aligned with the W3C's expectations about the work (it is modular and broken down). It showed interest from a lots of gr
Manu Sporny: Went well. We don't have a Task Force yet, but we are close. There were discussions about what should be in scope. There was an agreement on the end of the call to have an open discuss next Tuesday to discuss the problem statement in more depth. Everyone on this call is invited. Once we have the problem statement crisp, we will pull people who have expressed concern in and document their thoughts. If we are successful in
Manu Sporny: We will produce a W3C Working Group Charter.
Manu Sporny: This is a summary of the outcome and the minutes (member only).
Manu Sporny: This is the TF proposal.
Manu Sporny: That's how things went. Richard Varn, I would be interested in your thoughts on how it went.
Richard Varn: I heard this "interested but unconvinced" undertone.
Richard Varn: There is focused interest in particular technical issues that they miss the larger social good. There is an obsession in process. I'm not sure if they got why working with us is important. They seem to see it as a nice-to-have addition not a requirement for what they are doing.
Manu Sporny: Those are fair comments, let me try to explain the backstory.
Manu Sporny: Obsessed about details and process are the easiest ones to explain. Those came from someone who thinks the group isn't doing enough, but you should also do tokenization and identity on the Web. Tackle the Big Problems, not just the small problems.
Manu Sporny: PII in the financial space is a hot potato and nobody wants to touch it. Tokenization could help solve the problem. Go ahead and tackle those issue.
Manu Sporny: He agrees with us, he just wants us to do more.
Manu Sporny: The obsessed with process one... W3C has a process and it has been whittled into the form it is over 15-20. It serves them well, so they like to see things fit into the process they have. They are trying to be helpful. They said, "We think the vision of this group is grand and fantastic and we all want to see it. We need to convince the membership and they are only going to spend 15 min looking at the proposal before they
Manu Sporny: "We see gaps and are looking for talking points to help us talk to people and get more support."
Dave Longley: (Just wanted to add that process + obsession with details problems combined such that we weren't supposed to mention specific technology solutions to say "the tokenization thing can easily be solved with the Credentials CG credential technology too" ... because the process prohibited us from saying it.)
Manu Sporny: I've seen the list they have and it is different than our list, but very exciting if we can get them involved (from financial institutions, education, health care, etc.)
Manu Sporny: What were the other things, Richard?
Shane McCarron: Remember that the complete environment is a gestalt... At some point all of the pieces will be assembled and then the whole will be greater than the parts
Richard Varn: The four things we are looking at are all big issues, we aren't trying to solve all of them, but manage the relationships between them. I think they think we are not crucial to around what they are doing.
Manu Sporny: Last week I spoke to them and they suggested maybe we should focus on Education and Health Care rather than every one as a starting point.
Manu Sporny: But it is important to the Financial groups and managing the identity of transactions. The other part is how web payments flow and there is a lot of overlap and we think we can handle the straight payment process with a credential API.
Manu Sporny: Not everyone has the same pain points, but we think there is a wide support.
Shane McCarron: The one time task example yesterday was about customer onboarding - sign up. I thought
Manu Sporny: Any other questions about the direction we are headed?
Manu Sporny: Let's chat about what can happen here on out.

Topic: Goals for Next Week's Meeting

Manu Sporny: I sent out a proposal to the CG proposing we postpone these calls until further notice. The ones that will start next Tuesday in same time frame will be for the Verified Claims Task Force. It will be a different dial-in number. There will be other members from the WP IG.
Manu Sporny: W3C wants to make sure everyone is good with the problem statement. We want it to be crisp so that it is easy for someone to understand what we are trying to do easily.
Manu Sporny: Please review the problem statement again before the call next week. If you want to modify it, come up with specific text. There will be new people and they'll have open-ended conversations about the goal, but we'll only make progress if we have concrete statements and text to discuss.
Manu Sporny: Call next week, same date and time. We're going to focus on the problem statement. If we get through it, we can move onto scoping, phasing, who the stakeholders are, how we are going to run the meetings, etc. But, primarily we will focus on the problem statement until the W3C thinks we have talked it to death.
Manu Sporny: This is the new page for the task force.
Manu Sporny: It has the dial in details, etc.
John Tibbetts: Is this a renaming/replacing of credentials or is this a sidetrack or we will return credentials?
Nate Otto: +1 I like "Credentials"
Dave Longley: +1 Going back to Credentials once we get everything sorted out and various newcomers involved.
Nate Otto: But +1 to being sensitive to other people's preconceived notions about credentials, and +1 to putting off bikeshedding the name until later.
Shane McCarron: The name is for marketing purposes. who are we marketing to?
Manu Sporny: We changed the name because we were told calling it Credentials alienated people for some reason. We can change the name back if we agree to, but we need to tie it to the problem statement. "Verifiable claims" doesn't mean anything specific, but that may be why it doesn't bother people as much.
Manu Sporny: If we do it right, there will only be one group moving forward.
Shane McCarron: There is concern that this is an echo chamber?
Manu Sporny: We need to go into the discussion not talking about technology. There was concern that we didn't entertain other perspectives. The TF is an attempt to test whether this is an echo chamber before moving forward and talking about technology.
Shane McCarron: +1 That this is somewhat about rebranding. Also about adoption
Manu Sporny: We don't see this becoming a competing stack to what we are proposing, but there could be something cobbled together with other technology but they will have to come up with a counterproposal.
Manu Sporny: In summary, the CG process is broken because you may have to start over again. But, I think because we've done so much work, it should go faster.

Topic: Administrivia for Next Week's Meeting

Manu Sporny: Any other questions? Here is the dial-in information again. We will send out an email probably today to set up the meeting for next Tuesday. Number changes. IRC Channel changes.
Manu Sporny: We are going to scribe and record the audio for the calls to make sure we get anyone's concerns on record.
Manu Sporny: If not, we can end early. Thanks again to everyone. We are making good progress. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thank you for everyone who helped us get here.