[OpenID board] FW: Connect Work Group proposal

Sat May 22 16:03:43 UTC 2010

One way to communicate what these groups are striving for would be to  
take the WG proposals and map them together to form an ad-hoc roadmap  
showing the use-cases that various groups are attempting to solve  
whether from the spec, development, or product/marketing perspective.

In that same vein, I think it would be useful to have a '2010  
priorities' page on the OIDF web site outlining what the Foundation by  
way of its committees and WG are putting an emphasis on this year.

On May 22, 2010, at 11:51 AM, Brian Kissel wrote:

> This is GREAT feedback that the OIDF should take to heart - thank  
> you Dan.
>
>
> How can we communicate to the marketplace how all our WG initiatives  
> are
> related to each other, what the high level objectives and timing are  
> for
> each, who is leading them, how folks can participate, etc.  Is this
> something we should list in summary fashion on the OIDF website, with
> links to the various WG sites?
>
> Dan, in addition to the sample charter that you referred us to
> http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/oauth/charter/, are there any good  
> examples
> of how a SIG, Foundation, SDO, etc. presents the relationships between
> various working group initiatives?  Would be good to emulate the best
> practices already being used by others.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Brian
> ___________
>
> Brian Kissel
> CEO - JanRain, Inc.
> bkissel at janrain.com
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>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: openid-specs-bounces at lists.openid.net
> [mailto:openid-specs-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Dan  
> Brickley
> Sent: Saturday, May 22, 2010 1:35 AM
> To: David Recordon
> Cc: Roessler Thomas; openid-specs at lists.openid.net
> Subject: Re: Connect Work Group proposal
>
> +cc: Thomas Roessler
>> On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 8:42 AM, David Recordon <recordond at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hey Hans,
>> Rough consensus is the minimum bar and at times may be the greatest
>> possible consensus. It is also possible that the group reach  
>> consensus
>> greater than rough.
>
> Hi David,
>
> This seems like interesting and useful work and I'm glad to see it
> being brought under a chartered, documented process. However I share
> some of Dick's concerns ("Please explain what problem(s) you are
> trying to solve"). Unless you write down very explicitly the problems
> you think you're solving with this work, you'll find it very difficult
> to measure consensus, let alone achieve it. Lack of written
> requirements and goals will also make it harder for those outside the
> group (and outside the current OpenID world) to understand what you're
> attempting, to estimate your chances of success or likely timeline, or
> to determine whether and how to engage with it.
>
> If this were a W3C group, at this stage I would expect the Foundation
> to have an idea who the initial chair(s) of the group are, and how
> it's deliverables looked on a draft timeline. I don't know IETF habits
> so well, but something like the 'Goals and Milestones' section in
> http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/oauth/charter/ would seem appropriate
> here.
>
> It is also traditional for chartered standards activities to be a
> little more specific about their relationship to other groups (and
> their deliverables). Since the OpenID Foundation is a relatively new
> player, your audience will need some help understanding the extent to
> which the Foundation imposes a requirement on its own groups to
> produce architecturally consistent deliverables. As you are also
> basing this effort on work-in-progress from an IETF group, and since
> many of us around W3C are trying to work out how this fits into the
> wider Web standards landscape, it is important to be tediously
> specific here.
>
> Some standards 'brands' have a reputation for allowing lots of
> parallel work in related fields without strong top level
> 'interference' or coordination; others have a reputation for having a
> process that is slower due to an expectation of ensuring broad
> consistency across related work. You will need to help us learn what
> to expect from the OpenID Foundation. The fact that this is a
> single-topic standards body will raise expectations of strong
> consistency (between Connect and v.Next, in this case); the general
> hands-on 'web 2' / 'social web' culture of 'hey, let's just do it!'
> perhaps raises expectations that speed and pragmatism are valued over
> heavy integration. I should stress that neither end of the spectrum is
> 'right' here; good work comes in all these styles. But when you simply
> list "OpenID v.Next Working Group proposals." as related work, and
> don't give a timeline, specific dependencies or constraints, it
> becomes impossible for outsiders to understand the way things work
> here. Dick's mail shows that even OpenID insiders don't all have a
> common view.
>
> The more that can be written in your charter up-front, the better this
> will go.
>
> If and when you launch this group, please try to think through how it
> looks to those in the outside world! Many parties out there can't
> afford to track the fine-grained detail of the OpenID scene, and look
> for the larger trends. A v.Next and a Connect initiative launched at
> the same time will need some care, otherwise - to be blunt - it looks
> like chaos. Perhaps a creative, exciting  chaos, but one that external
> parties won't want to plan around. When Apple's new iPhone leaks,
> people stop buying the old ones. When a new OpenID WG launches, people
> stop hacking on OpenID v-last-year software implementations. When
> *two* new  future-of-OpenID WG efforts launch, people lose any sense
> of what's going on. If you were working hard on implementing OpenID
> and saw the Foundation launch two new groups whose charters barely
> mentioned each other, would you feel confident about spending time
> continuing to implement?
>
> If this is expected to be the main current trunk of the Foundations
> work on OpenID, the Foundation (and hence charter) should say so
> explicitly. If it is expected to be accompanied by a v.Next sibling
> group, please say what the interactions are to be with that group; how
> will responsibilities and themes be managed? If it is essentially a
> research or incubator group, created to map out the design space of
> possible Oauth-layered OpenID systems, and to understand and document
> the security, usability and deployment characteristics of different
> designs, please say so. I hate to be so boring about this but you
> can't afford to have a charter that just says "trust us", ie. "[we]
> have strong relationships in many of these communities and do not
> anticipate the need of formal liaisons". Many groups outside the inner
> circle here are looking to this work and are trying to understand
> whether (and when) the OpenID community will deliver something they
> can have strong dependencies on.
>
> My reading of the draft is that it is essentially investigative; a
> support / research / prototyping group. I get that from counting the
> number of times 'explore' is used (eight :). I guess therefore that no
> other OpenID Foundation group has strong dependencies on it, and it is
> intended to serve as a more exploratory sibling activity to any V.Next
> 'main track' work.
>
> For this to be feasible I think you need to add:
>
> * explicit requirements (you have long lists of technical and other
> constraints in your heads; please write them down!)
> * explicit goals and timeline
> * names of initial chair(s) of the WG; whose job is it to keep the
> work on track?
> * explicit statement of relationship with any v.Next activities,  
> however
> drafty
>
> Now it is quite possible that this exploratory WG discovers something
> fantastic which should be brought into the main V.Next track of OpenID
> ASAP. If the charter had a 'end Aug 2010: provide a report on any
> discovered fantasticness to the v.Next WG' bullet point, we could
> start to imagine a V.Next WG charter which had 'Sept 2010: review of
> Connect work for possible fantastic ideas'. If you think this could
> all happen by the end of June, let's write that down. If the V.Next
> charter drafters think they could be open to OAuth-based stuff along
> the lines of Connect until -say- July, but after that, they'll have
> picked a design, then let's have their charter reflect that too.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
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