Digital art exists, there is a trading place for that

Interesting conference this week in Mozilla office in Paris. Chris Messina @chrismessina stopped by, invited by FivebyFive, to share his current hobby. Digital art.

He discussed several aspects of digital art : what is it, what does it look like, how could it be tomorrow, provided that the technology evolve. And the essential question behind : in the era of pixels and beats being multiplied in one click at no (visible) cost, how could digital artist survive and get paid for their creations.

Well. First it is a matter of faith and value. Either you don’t care, and you copy like hell. Or you believe that artists have a special role to play in our society, and deserve your support. Second, you need to have a place where digital artists are offering their work to a public. Reproducing the principles of commercial gallery. Third, to refrain the hacking, you may enable a versioning of the art pieces. Versioning will create scarcity, which is a fundamental for value creation for art.

Let’s say. I am a fan of unicorn drawing, I buy a digital drawing on the internet, I get a place to store it and a certificate. When I get bored owning it, I can sell it to another unicorn addict. Chris Messina presented to us a platform which enables that scenario. It is named Neonmob https://www.neonmob.com/ and is in beta version. With Neonmob, you acquire art piece, for free or for money, it comes with a certificate – limited editions are stamped, thanks to a bitcoin-like crypto operation. The platform allows you to track if your art piece is extremely rare, or very common, which helps you to define a value to your collection.

 

Note that @marklor reminded his friends that ‘deviant art’ http://www.deviantart.com/ is also a platform allowing to do more or less the same. I let you benchmarking both solutions.

That evening was really interesting cause it covered at the same time the question of what is digital art (a drawing, an animated GIF, a programmable image, a piece of music created with movement sensors, an image animated via wind sensor, …), why is it necessary to create scarcity in digital art, how to collect and enjoy your digital art… This is certainly just the beginning of the questions technologist and art lovers will have to think about and share.

[Musée] Art contemporain, du côté de chez Cartier

fondation cartier 30 ansLa fondation Cartier fête 30 années de mécénat tourné vers l’art contemporain. Une occasion pour aller visiter ce lieu, posé rive gauche, le long du boulevard Raspail. Cette tour de verre accueille s’élève sur plusieurs étages, et accueille dans son sous-sol, et son rez-de-chaussée des œuvres rapportés de rétrospectives précédentes. Les pieds de la tour sont plantés dans jardin, qui lui aussi est une œuvre d’art. Que peut-on observer dans cette exposition anniversaire ? L’art contemporain a ceci d’intéressant qu’il a souvent un parti pris de caractère, et risque donc de détourner aussi bien que d’étonner son spectateur. Je ne partagerai donc ici que les œuvres qui m’ont tapée dans l’œil, dans le désordre, et vous laisse le soin de visiter l’exposition pour me signaler les autres pièces qui vous paraîtraient maîtresses.

–          « Fishnet » de Jivya Soma Mashe. Une toile très classique, comparée au reste des pièces présentées. Elle représente une scène de pêche, délicate, en deux tons.

jivya soma mashe fishnet paris - Copy

–          ”In bed” de Ron Mueck. Une sculpture terriblement réaliste d’une femme mélancolique dans un lit. Réaliste, mais également géante. Pas un visiteur ne reste silencieux ou immobile devant cette vision, frappante de réalisme.

femme geante bis

–          Moébius. Représenté par deux carnets, effeuillés et soigneusement alignés sur les murs. Le trait précis du maître ne peut que séduire. Une projection d’un film en 3D est également programmée. Moébius y met en valeur la légèreté par le vol de vaisseau, la danse effrayante de créatures filiformes, la course des corps dans une végétation bondissante.

carnet moebius

–          Les objets amusants de Takeshi Kitano – oui le cinéaste. Mi-animal, mi-machine, Takeshi Kitano transforme des insectes, des poissons ou des mammifères en moteur de tank, roue motrice de train…

gosse d artistegosse d artiste tergosse d artiste quatre

 

–          Les lampes en pliage de Issey Miyake, qui éclairent la pièce principale de l’exposition, mais également le jardin.

issey miyakke in-ei

Justement, parlons-en du jardin qui cerne la tour Cartier. Il est vert, sauvage, mais structuré. Certaines installations sont des acquisitions de la fondation, des pierres agencées, un mini-auditorium composé de deux bancs et un lavoir. Une roulotte sert des boissons. Je n’aurai pas le temps d’en profiter  de grosses gouttes de pluie s’écrasent sur mon carnet et me font fuir. Reste un couple d’amoureux attablé qui discute sagement sous un parapluie…

 

Note : autres billets relatifs aux musées https://poulpita.com/tag/musee/

Ordering an orange juice at W3C bar

ordering at the bar

Little tiny things that would make my W3C life better…

Those who contribute to W3C know that it is a real experience, mixing technical, human and procedural aspects. Trying to think about a better W3C, there a few things I’d like to share, hoping the next W3C Advisory Board will fix it –with or without me. As this requires several posts, here is the episode 1 season 1 on little tiny things that would make our W3C life better. And it is named ‘Ordering an orange juice at W3C bar’

Bars. We all know what it is to enter the first time in a bar, lets say in a new town, or even an unknown country. If this place is really really new, you don’t know what are the customs. You may wonder how to get your orange juice (or beer, or wine, or sake, or tomato juice, whatever you drink in bars). Can you get a table on your own, or will someone allocate you one ? Do you get served by a kind waiter, do you need to order at the bar, or do you place order from the electronic table itself ? Do you need to pay directly, or later. It may not be the most natural thing to shout ‘call me the director of this bar, I need to understand how things are ruling here’. In that case you may look at the others, try to read announcement, observing the ambiance. And that is part of the discovery adventure.

W3C. If you want to contribute in W3C, you may enjoy the same experience. When rambling from one working group to another, you discover different spirits (more or less rock and roll) but also different tools. Example. You wanna track bugs on a spec ? Several options. Use W3C tracker, suitable for issue, action. Use W3C bugzilla for bugs. Use github for everything. WABTC ! What a barrier to contributors. If you combine this with the fact that survival kit is not always provided, contributor may spend a lots of time understanding the working rules of a specific working group. They may call the director to get explanation about how things are ruling. But W3C should also help them to enter smoothly in the working group.

What to do to make W3C a place you naturally order your orange juice? I would not wish to have all W3C working group adopting the same tools. People want freedom there. But what would help would be.

–          When creating a new working group, train the team (chair and editors) to the entire set of tools, with a rationale for their specific advantage. This should include the github platform, which is widely used in W3C, popular to some developers, but not the usual framework for all of them (and I don’t even talk about non-developers, like me who are also reasonable part of the working force and contributors in W3C). But it could also include platforms such as Discourse that some poeple like Robin Berjon is experiencing.

–          Document accurately working group customs and working methods, including some of the process to follow up on the specifications. How to open a bug (who, when, where), how to contribute to a bug (who, when, where), how to close a bug (who, when, where). This should be made in an easy place to find, with cool design… And if all answers to those questions is ‘it depends’, then the working group team should revise its working method.

Lets make W3C a cool place to contribute, lets make contributors life easier !

 

Note : picture by Mista Boos in Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/mistaboos/

[book] L’écriture : travail de mémoire, de force et d’équilibre

Le weekend dernier se tenait à Aix en Provence les Journées des Écrivains du Sud, dans la majestueuse cour de l’Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède, à deux pas de la Cathédrale Saint Sauveur et de l’Archevêché. Un bel endroit, pour de belles rencontres. On y croise Fréderic Mitterrand (en tenue décontracté, entouré de groupies de tous âge, qu’il accueille patiemment), quelques caricatures d’intellectuels parisiens (coupe longue, écharpe en soie…), mais surtout, on y écoute la parole d’écrivains sur le processus d’écriture. Laissez-moi-vous rapporter quelques points de vue sur cette question, entendus au cours des nombreuses conférences qui animaient ces rencontres. Deux perspectives, de deux écrivaines, qui m’ont paru particulièrement pertinentes, généreuses et sages.

Mazarine Pingeot. Ecrivaine. Fille de François Mitterrand. Longtemps gardée au secret. Que nous dit Mazarine sur les raisons et les procédés d’écriture. Elle y mêle évidemment son parcours singulier, et son enfance contraignante, où il lui était devenu une seconde nature de ne parler, ni trop, ni trop précisément, au sein de sa famille et à l’extérieur. Afin de ne pas trahir le secret des autres. Dans cette situation particulière, la lecture et l’écriture lui ont paru le media idéal pour dire les choses interdites, rencontrer des univers bavards et transparents. Voilà pour la motivation de se construire une vie d’écrivain. Maintenant pour le geste d’écriture en lui-même. La fiction apparaît à Pingeot comme la voie royale, pour retrouver sa mémoire confisquée, étouffée par nécessité. Car les choses non-dites, nous rappelle-t-elle, disparaissent (un argument qui me touche particulièrement, mais il s’agit là d’une autre histoire). La recherche de cette mémoire est donc un travail de chaque instant, un travail de récupération, qui oblige l’auteur à saisir chaque écho, chaque fulgurance, et de les retranscrire avec une voie singulière, un style particulier. Dans quel but ? Mazarine s’explique. Pour résoudre le problème d’avoir été crée par l’histoire des autres (un peu le lot de chacun, n’est ce pas ?). Pour se réconcilier avec soi. Pour accéder ainsi à une certaine forme de liberté.

Autre écrivaine. Autre perspective Maylis de Kerangal présente le roman comme un espace, dans lequel toute forme d’usage des mots est soluble : le fait divers, la biographie, la chanson, l’histoire, le poème. Genre malléable, sans règle – le mauvais genre, résume-t-elle – c’est également le lieu de l’hyper-décision de l’auteur. L’auteur doit donc être porté pour couper, trancher, décider, percer les mots, et créer une œuvre vraie. Ainsi Mayliss partage avec nous son processus de création. Elle décide de l’ambiance de son ouvrage. Plutôt intérieur, extérieur, ouvert, fermé, lumineux, sombre. Elle dégage ensuite une histoire, un univers, puis une question – qui peut apparaitre au fil de l’écriture. Et elle l’alimente. Par de la documentation, et par les émotions, les expériences, les rencontres que cette démarche documentaire fait émerger. Un processus qui se nourrit des matériaux rencontrés en chemin. Un processus qui nécessite un élan au départ. Ce que Maylis appelle la vague. Un mouvement, pétri d’énergie, mais aussi de risque de retomber, de céder au vertige. Le roman ne se résous et n’émerge donc que lorsque l’écrivain sait concilier les forces contradictoires qui le traversent : la terreur d’écrire et le désir d’écrire.

Deux voix, l’une prônant le travail de mémoire nécessaire à une liberté, l’autre prônant le travail volontaire et courageux.

Deux voies que les auteurs pourront mêler pour trouver leur propre chemin vers l’écriture.

 

Note : je ne peux que vous recommander de lire Corniche Kennedy de Maylis de Kerangal, un roman dense et court.

 

More web developers in W3C !

palette_couleur_by_romain

W3C Advisory Board elections are getting lots of traction from W3C members. Questions, suggestions, initiatives are multiplied and when being part of the candidates, you need to take position, agreeing disagreeing… For example voting system discussion (see the W3C public process mailing list thread). But there is behind this voting question, the question of W3C participants. Who are they ? Do they really represent the web ? Do they really represent the web developer comunity.

But first, why would we need more web developers ? Actually, we do have some smart and brilliant ones. But most of the time, the ones working for big companies, big structures or universities. But they might not represent the actual developer who will be torturing the features and APIs embedded in browsers. Some of them are present, but a majority is not.

As a tourist. Since I entered the web community, I am going into web developers conferences to learn, meet people, evangelize also security. And each time I am explaining I am representing my company in W3C, I can see stars in the eyes of my interlocutor. “Such a great job, so lucky to be there ?”. And I am always thinking. “Well, if I can do it, you should be able to do it, especially because you have already designed a super-nice-smart-cool web app, something I have never done in my life, but which is on my to do list “.

As a chair. In the working group I am chairing, we are in theory 50 people, but 10 of them are driving the work. They are mainly browser vendors and there is one service provider. Off course all those guys are educated and connected with web developers community. But it happens that W3C needs also to design APIs which is not going to be used by the 3 or 4 use cases that group participants are thinking about, for them, and for their own developer community. And it happens also that sometimes we miss a feedback from the real life (as an example, in the web crypto API, we asked, please mister or mrs web dev, give me your opinion on the best design, but reviews are always hard to get).

What I think. I think that W3C needs to interact more with the web developers community, not only during events and conferences (which is already something great, see http://www.w3.org/Talks/), but also *in* W3C. We need fresh blood. To review and challenge the spec. To make sure the feature designed will be actually widely used, wider than initially thought. To help in prioritizing the features we want to develop (we may call our mate, our mum, our brother to decide which feature is the most urgent, but they may have exactly the same opinion as ours). To edit specifications (see the very good post from Robin Berjon explaining how it is difficult to have editors). To beta-test API prior it is shipped. To counter balance the opinion of the super-hyper-expert who maybe lost his or her freshness.

How to have more web developers ?

With a 2 steps approach.

One. Make sure that all working group participants, chairs, editors are always ambassadors of the W3C. Getting traction from web developers they meet, convincing them to look at the spec, comment, be involved. This is very easy for popular specifications like EME (everyone has something to say about EME, right ?), WebRTC (which is so powerfull that it pulls entire conferences), Service Workers (which is promoted by charismatic people). This can only happen if all W3C participants are educated on a regular basis on what is going on, by receiving training, regular reviews on domain activities. The quest here is information for all,…

Two. Make sure there is a structure to welcome the web developers. W3C has different members status. You can be a startup, you can be an invited expert, but the individual membership is not yet available. When Brian Kardell pointed me on a group of people in W3C setting up the basis of a web developer individual membership, I realized that it was exactly the missing piece. This ‘webizen’ task force https://www.w3.org/wiki/Webizen will share the result of its thinking in June 2014, during the W3C Advisory Council meeting, where all W3C members representatives meet. Webizen brainstorming is open to anyone, so if you feel you have ideas, do not hesitate. The quest here is W3C membership for all.

I really hope that W3C and its current members will succeed in lowering the entry barrier to W3C and benefit from having all players around the table, including web developers. Integration of web developers into W3C circles, getting them more involved in discussions and decisions, as candidate to AB election, I support that !

 

Note : picture ‘Gamme’ by Romain https://www.flickr.com/photos/xyotiogyo/

 

Running for W3C Advisory Board, again…

W3C dancer and runner by Clau Tom

May is the season where W3C organizes election for its Advisory Board, the group of 10 people representing W3C members and helping improving W3C process and advising W3C management on strategy. My regular readers know that last year I was part of the candidates, and they may be happy to know that I’ll try again this year. Talking with my colleagues from gemalto, they were challenging me.

“Why are you doing that ? Representing gemalto in different W3C working groups may be enough, isn’t it ?” Well. Yes. And no.

That is true that I am spending more than half of my time supporting W3C activities. That includes my chairmanship position in web crypto and web security IG (a public security experts community), monitoring W3C deliverable to report to my colleagues when there is something interesting happening, supporting W3C workshops (automotive, payment and soon security related). Believe me, that job is not always easy, especially in a company which is not directly getting revenues from web applications and services, yet. In other words, if you don’t like that job, you can’t make it.

So that is said, I like W3C. Why ?

I have been in standard for a while now, experiencing different governance, different group size, involved with different positions (observer, contributor, editor, chair), always in technology and international contexts. And after all those years I must confess that W3C has been the most welcoming house, with a goal and framework that really makes sense to me. Supporting W3C development and helping to transform the open web platform into a widely adopted platform, suitable to any services is a great objective, to my opinion. Process and governance questions are part of that challenge, as more and more members are joining, and more an more members are needed to make that platform relevant.

And I want to be part of that move.

Well, once you say ‘I wanna join the party’, you have to think about your own value proposition. Who am I to run for AB ? Well. I am experienced in standards. I am a hard working person. I am a consensual person, listening to problem, looking for advice and conflicting opinion, and always targeting decision making (I hate vague and unknown status and I know it’s sometimes terrible for my relatives and colleagues).

And I have a plan.

Based on what I have seen those last two years and half in W3C, I have drafted a kind of program, things I believe would benefit from my energy. Like everyone, I want a better world, but more precisely, I ‘d like to :

(1) Increase visibility of W3C deliverables for members and non-members, by supporting the creation of dashboard (I wrote about it, yet)

(2) Improve web developers community feedback, involvement and representation in W3C (leveraging openness of W3C with public event and webizen-like project)

(3) Maintain motivation of contributors, including education and supporting tools, with a specific focus on editors and chairs.

(4) Ensure that securing the web sits at the core of the evolution of the consortium, as required by device manufacturers and security-sensitive companies

All is said. Let’s see if this plan looks good enough for the 389 W3C members to vote for me and help me to get one of the 5 open seats in the W3C Advisory Board. The voting period is all May and results are in June. If you know some of the voters, and like the idea to see me elected, just tell them.

If you just want to encourage me, you can advert that post or leave comments, suggestions …

I will keep you informed about the results, for sure.

 

Update: some others are also campaigning, you can read the posts from Brian and Boaz.

Update : other porst related to that W3C AB election on my blog : More web developers in W3C and all other posts related to W3C

Note : picture Runner and Dancer by Claus Tom, under creative common license https://www.flickr.com/photos/claustom/

 

 

 

About the very simple question of identity, security and privacy in Web Payment

w3c web Payment_small.jpg

Again, about the W3C Web Payment Workshop in Paris. Two weeks ago, discussion went on the definition of payment, the notion of user experience, the architecture of back end systems and the end to end picture. The main objective for such workshop was to identify web related topics on which all parties (merchants, banks, payment schemes, regulating government, payment service processors, ….) would agree to get more standard. This will take time as I already mentionned in a previous post. The conversation was structured, but it happened that for each of the scheduled sessions, after one hour of talk, the questions related to identity, security was systematically raised. How can you garantee that the payee is the one he pretends to be ? How can you you garantee that the money is safely transferred, stored ?  As moderator of the Identity, Security and Privacy, I felt like my panel would be an interesting piece of the workshop.

Throwing the question ‘how can you garantee your system is secure ?’ is a little bit unfair.  Obviously, no one can garantee a system to be 100% secure (at a certain point of time, someone will break it), so you have to think about risk evaluation, tools to help implementing security, indicators to monitor trust… And this is what the poeple from the panel shared : good practices, feedbacks and valuable advices to build a common solution to bring with payment some notion of identity, security and privacy. Here is my take away from the discussions.

Identity, what is it ? With Louise from British Computer Science and Tim from Microsoft, we explored the notion of identity with two different perspective. Tim, involved in the e-commerce platform of Microsoft shared with the participants a notion of commerce identity, that would encompass our usual personal information, but also our friend, our relatives, our payment means, our interactions, our reputation. The idea suggested here was to build one identity, based on the principle of aggregating our identities and make it available to services providers via APIs. The direct consumers of this meta-identity could be banks, merchants, but also anti fraud banking system,  government, locally or international. Obviously the question of user control and privacy was raised. And this is where Louise made a great speech about the way identity, privacy, anonymity, traceability were major topics that companies, citizen and regulation should take care of. The rationale for this special care was the coming explosion of peer to peer financial transaction enabled by the web. This use case would multiply the needs to protect peers, regulates fraud and balance privacy aspects.

Identity, who should manage it ? Several participants gave a view on that notion of handling identity. Natasha Rooney, from GSMA mentioned in her  contribution that they had a program named GSMA Mobile Connect, which would allow service providers to use mobile network operators users database and trust the identify of those users. This offer completed with a strategy of direct billing on subscribers bills would position them as ideal identity providers in mobile commerce. Another view, Ripple Labs, the ones maintaining Ripple Network, mentioned that identity should be managed in a decentralized way. What does it mean ? Ripple Network is a network payment solution, which relies on a network of Ripple Gateways. Those gateways are disseminated all around the world, and this is where each user willing to transfer money should register, providing with email and banking details. Choosing a gateway suiting his constraints in terms of currency, transaction operation … Each Ripple Gateway implements the Ripple Transaction Protocol which allows to transfer money from any currency from one user to another, provided that this one owns a Ripple Wallet. In that case, identity is managed by registering to Gateways. The case of Facebook and Google managing the user’s identity was not directly discussed but raised on a regular basis. One could conclude that several identity provider profiles could be defined, from traditional kinda official (MNO) to decentralized email based (Ripple network).

Identity, how to convey it ? Lets say you are an identity provider. You need to offer services to consume your user’s identity to service providers. The next questions you would have to answer would be : which protocol should support exchange of identity related information? which piece of the identity should be shared ? how to make sure that the user agrees with sharing his identity ? Most of the presenters mentioned the recently published Open ID Connect as the technology that makes the job. First, it relies on the recent version of OAuth, an authorization protocol that Hannes Tschofenif, co-chair or IETF OAuth WG exposed to the audience. Hannes concluded saying that OAuth was a good enabler for identity scheme, provided that security recommendations were implemented and that proprietary plug-in were not killing the interoperable nature of it. Second, Open ID Connect includes an flexible authentication mechanism (how do you make sure the user authorizing access is the right user). Stefan from Ripple Labs confirmed, adding that Ripple Network was using it, allowing a good granularity in rights and flexibility in user authentication. Ripple made password and game with cryptography, but one could imagine to have the FIDO Alliance UAF technology used for such authentication.

Payment, identity and security, what promise ? About the actual enablers for security in web payment, we heard several voices promoting different types of perspectives. On the device side, Giri from Qualcom said that mobile payment security scheme could get benefit of user’s contextual information, combined with trusted enablers, listing technologies the web payment could benefit from : geolocalization, multiple factor authentication, hardware token and fingerprinting. On the protocol side, Hannes recalled the audience that state of the art in security as promoted in IETF should be implemented to avoid failure. There was a consensus on the fact that cryptography was a great enablers of trust and security (trusting someone could be translated as sharing a cryptography secret with him). This is what Harry Halpin from W3C promoted the recent Web Crypto API (that my readers all know went to Last Call last week). This API will allow developers to manage and use keys in their web applications. Last but not least, Gregory from Lyra Network among other good feedbacks for promoting a decentralized web traffic to increase trust, reminded that users were to be educated in order to have a better control on their identity data and data in general. He also highlighted the idea of building identity of users on multiple devices, including the ones belonging to the wearable IoT wave, feeding the *what you have* factor to authenticate users.

This session did not bring any direct conclusion on the complex problem of identity, security and privacy, but drove the audience on different perspectives. The excellent minutes and presentations from that session are available on http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/minutes/2014-03-25-s6/ . All the web community is now waiting for the W3C report on that workshop, which will sum up and prioritize the possible actions that could happen in W3C.

 

[Musée] Un regard sur Visages

 

indexVisages

Marseille. La Vieille Charité, dans le quartier du Panier. Quartier bobo-prolo. Un îlot cerné par la cathédrale de la Major, le MUCEM, l’Hôtel Dieu et le Boulevard des Dames. La Vieille Charité bonifie avec le temps. Ancien hospice, elle accueille un centre de poésie, une librairie, un bistrot sympa, les Musées des Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amérindiens, et des expositions temporaires. En ce moment, Visages. (more…)

Two days of W3C workshop about web and payment

w3c web Payment_small.jpgThis week W3C Web Payment workshop was amazing: one hundred registered people, representing all the chain of web payment. From merchants to banks, including payment system providers, from established financial institutions to challenging startupers, from browser makers to mobile network operators. All those delegates agreed to spend 2 days in Palais Brongniard in Paris, to discuss how standardization should be driven in W3C, to improve the integration of web payment in the open web platform. During two days, the audience tried to identify the minimum common agreement to ease end user experience when buying something on the web, and imagine how payment systems could be more efficiently integrated in the the web. In addition to the usual suspects (Google, Mozilla, GSMA, Yandex), the lucky attendees could hear opinion from less talkative companies such as : PCI (payment security certification), BPCE (french bank), SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), Federal US Reserve (the big us wallet), BCS, Rabobank, EU delegate, Ripple Labs, HubCulture pomoting Ven, NACS US merchants. New faces giving their opinion, to usual suspects from W3C.

What can we expect from such event ?
First. Build a tribe. And I think that the workshop was a success. Interaction was key, breaks and dinner also helped people to meet and understand each other. Second. Decide where the tribe wants to go. This is less straightforward. Once everyone understood that it was quite complex to find the right balance between standard and competition, the key mission that became natural to everyone was to understand the roles and concepts handled in the story of a payment transaction. Questions : what is the ideal user experience, what are merchant roles and boundaries, what characteristics define a payment service provider, do intermediaries count, is payment a single service, or does it include quotation management… Understanding the payment steps and splitting that journey into a reliable description. This is for the business and flow side. Another domain identified to be explored collaboratively was related to the technology. When one asked ‘what is a token for you’, depending where you come from, the token answer could have different taste (actualy four different definitions were found). Same for the wallet… So in the end, it was obvious that the tribe needed to build a common understanding.

The necessary consensus.
Lets be clear. Any payment standardization work will not happen if disruptive Ripple Labs promoting decentralized network, does not understand mobile network operators, if Microsoft promoting an e-commerce identity does not listen to EU on privacy, or if merchants are not making their mind clear on virtualized money advantages (a la bitcoin). Off course the matrix of mutual understanding is infinite. But one should note that extreme should carefully listen each other. And this will be a challenge that may take some time. At the same time, it was highlighted that neither Visa or Mastercard or MCX merchants were present, and their voice should definitely be heard, there.

The coming battles.
When covering such a large topic as the payment is, involving so much actors, and when you increase the complexity by taking into account new comers such as bitcoin promoters, decentralized network designers, you can easily identify the big, big, blockers on which this community may fight. The following words sound to me like burning the brains: system interconnection and fee harmonization (right, this could be kept away from W3C landscape), user convenience versus security, user data owner (ouch, that one is the business basement, right ?), privacy by design, identity scheme (fragmented and contradictory visions here).

Where could the tribe start ? small pieces of technology.
During the discussion, it appeared that it would not be possible to build a complete standard solution, to leave a room to existing models and integrate the disruptive ones. So the opposite view was considered: why not designing very small pieces of enablers, such as transaction definition, a transaction flow and related states, a simple intent to pay framework, some auto-filling functions, … This primary list are just ideas, and will definitely enrich during the coming discussions.

Where do we meet next ?
That recently born web payment tribe must follow up. It could gather again either re-using the Web payment community group chaired by Manu Sporny, attached to (but not belonging to) W3C. Or a new group could be created. That plan will be made in the coming weeks, once all the W3C staff had brainstormed on the minutes of the workshop (slides and minutes). Lets wait the official take away from W3C.

 

You can also read my post related to the Identity, Security and Privacy session, that i moderated here : https://poulpita.com/2014/04/04/about-the-very-simple-question-of-identity-security-and-privacy-in-web-payment/