Re: [Taler] W3C web payments interest group and working group

[Christian Grothoff]

Hi Bruno,

I'm aware of the group, but for participation there are a few issues:
1) Official participation ("Good standing") requires regular attendance,
   involving frequent in-person travel and (weekly?) teleconferences.
   Right now, that would be hard for us to do both financially and
   personally; if someone is able to help with that, this would be
   great.
2) Additionally, there is the cost of participating in W3c in the
   first place. We may be able to participate under the Inria banner
   or as an invited expert, but given (1) I've not even tried to sort
   this out.
3) Much of the process so far seems to be gathering requirements:
   "The Web Payments IG has only had the opportunity to review a
    handful of the 40+ use cases, 120+ requirements..." --- while
   the result of this exercise may be helpful, we don't really have
   spare capacity to deal with non-related tasks (for example,
   they list biometrics and payer-initiated payment, neither of
   which applies at all to Taler).

Now [4] is a collection of business processes / use cases giving
examples for different ways people have realized payments.  Nothing in
there conflicts with what we do in GNU Taler, but like any other payment
system we don't support every form of use-case listed either.
(like, for example, there won't be payer-initiated payments).


So, to answer your last question: We are aware of the group and would
probably like to participate eventually, but there is no great plan yet.
However, what is there so far also seems entirely unproblematic,
possibly because it is also still very vague.


My 2 cents

-Christian

On 10/25/2015 02:41 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The W3C has a "web payments interest group" [1], that has already produced
> some documents [2][3][4].
> 
> Furthermore, the W3C has opened a "web payments working group" this week
> [5][6][7]. Its charter is at [8], [9].
> 
> I don't see GNU nor the INRIA nor the TU München represented among the
> members of this interest group [10] or the working group [11].
> 
> 1) Can someone tell whether the "use cases" document [4] can accommodate
>    the way Taler works?
> 
> 2) In my experience, when standardization takes place and you are not
>    involved in this standardization, often the resulting standard does
>    not accommodate your architecture or requirements, and then you are
>    in an up-hill battle position.
>    Taler IMO already has a challenging adoption problem: chicken&egg
>    problem, the clients and merchants and mints must adopt it at the
>    same pace. If additionally the W3C web payment recommendations that
>    comes out is in conflict with Taler's design, adoption could be
>    even harder, due to technical issues.
> 
>    Therefore: is there a plan that Taler has a representative in this
>    working group?
> 
> Bruno
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Vision
> [3] http://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/Roadmap/
> [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/web-payments-use-cases/
> [5] http://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/
> [6] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2015Oct/0000.html
> [7] 
> http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/W3C-gruendet-Arbeitsgruppe-fuer-einheitliches-Bezahlen-im-Internet-2852566.html
> [8] http://www.w3.org/Payments/WG/charter-201510.html
> [9] https://www.w3.org/Payments/IG/wiki/Web_Payments_WG_Charter_FAQ
> [10] https://www.w3.org/2000/09/dbwg/details?group=73816&public=1
> [11] https://www.w3.org/2000/09/dbwg/details?group=83744&public=1
> 
> 
>