… My background is in web apps and have worked in SaaS with credit cards.

… We also showed use cases.

… We focused primarily around credentials uses for payments. Initial feedback is that they would like to see it broader (e.g., Healthcare and Education). The discussions last week at the Advisory Committee reinforced that.

… We did a number of interviews to see what they thought about the work. A number of respondents were very cautious, due to previous failures in the space (OpenID Connect, SAML, …).

… There was some pushback questioning why this work was different. We were able to sit down with them (Dan Applequist). He’d like to see more general language at the beginning of the doc to make it clear what problem we’re trying to solve.

… We spoke with the AC Rep from Apple (David Singer) who was also cautious.

… We also spoke with Harry Halpin, who has been most strongly opposed to the work. We indicated that the charter was modified due to his input. He thought this was a positive step, but had not reviewed the charter. He raised an issue on our claim of consensus to create a charter. I went through the list of people, and he had no response to that. (He’d like to see the list).

… We brought up VC, and I didn’t hear any strong objection to the work. There are upwards of 400 members, and we would need to respond if we get any formal objections.

… All in all, it was really good; it didn’t seem like anyone was surprized or came out of left field. We talked with W3CM (Jeff Jaffe) who wanted to see how it was going, and to see who would be Staff contact for this work.

… I mentioned that gkellogg is a front-runner as far as being a staff contact, but we need to find funding, but others may come up too.

… We’re going to ask people for committments, show up, join W3C, etc. If we don’t get at least 20 W3C members voting for it, and at least 15 people who show up regularly. Good news is that we’ve had that engagement so far, but people need to commit to join the W3C.

… We need to hire a W3C Fellow, make test suites, and so forth, and that takes money. We’re at the point where it needs funding for us to start. If we start without that in place, the work could falter.

… We haven’t yet circled back with interviewees, and survey respondents this week. There’s a question of if we should create a committment questionaire.

… The faster we get to 20 commitments, the better, but we should shoot for 50 organizations supporting the work.

… It takes 20-25 yes votes to start. There must be at least 10 participants on each call.

… Once we get to that point, the charter will go up for formal review. There’s 1-2 months for review and voting. W3C will review votes and handle objections, and hopefully, we’ll have a WG after that. Timeline is still end of July to start the WG.

… We’re releasing a blog post about our experiences with the Web Payments group so far: things have not gone well, at least when it came to our group creating a bunch of specs and putting it into a WG. We tried to get browser vendors on board, but bad things happened.

… Even though we’ve asked and giving notification, and we’re not doing protocol, which they care about, there are no guarantees. The WPIG is an example of how things can fall apart. That’s one of the biggest concerns we have, how to mitigate risks of powerful groups coming in and disrupting the process.

… As dlongley says, starting small and getting deployments is key. Having deployments in an industry before it comes into W3C is a good thing, as it validates the vision, and shows that it can’t be easily moved. Its a risk we need to understand

… We need to take a closer look at the use cases document to make sure everyone understands it. Particularly as people think it’s too focused on payments.

… Realistically, we need another month to do this work. But, really ASAP. Reviews should be in by the end of this week so we can review it.

… Next week, we’ll try and see how we’re doing with commitments; we’re going to need everyone’s help to get commitments for this work.

… Then we need to be sure the work is well-funded, so we don’t languish.

… Typically, you create a charter, and companies join. But, when the work starts, they typically send people to do the work that are stretched too thin. A number of WG’s I’ve participating in, the vast amount of work is done by Volunteers (Invited Experts). This is a skill that people acquire over years, which can slow down the work.

… The question is, do we depend on companies to do the work, or do we hire people to support us through the process, that’s what Spec Ops is about (Specification Operations). It was set up to accellerate the process of doing standards work, so we don’t hit the typical snags.

… We need folks like ShaneM, he’s the projects manager at SpecOps; same with Gregg and Dan. It’s highly unlikelly that W3C will staff the work.

… We don’t have a good response, as no current W3C staff member has jumped at it; a failed effort reflects badly on the staff, and noone has an appitite for the work, and they’re swamped. We’re going to have to bring in someone from the outside.

… A company can fund a “W3C Fellow” to do such work. A number of us have been through this process before, which helps us out.

… We’re not saying you need to buy a standard, but work like this needs dedicated people doing the work. There’s a lot of cross-group coordination needed, which is something the staff contact makes happen. SpecOps is about finding such experts and getting them into the work.

… If a number of organizations join and staff with good technologists, that’s great! (This rarely happens). Because of the high risk of people pointing to this and saying “I told you so”, I’m particularly concerned.

… If it starts out and it turns out there’s a large number of qualified people, then we won’t need SpecOps, but I’ve rarely seen that happen (maybe once).

… when we start a WG we need an idea about how this work is going to happen. Right now, we don’t have a solid plan for RDF Normalization, LD Signatures, WebDHT or decentralized identifier work. Without those technologies, we don’t have portable credentials.