[OIDFSC] FW: Proposal to create the TX working group

[Mike Jones]

I have to agree with David that this charter is far from minimal or specific in many respects.  One of my concerns is the same as David's below - when XMLDSIG and other signature algorithms already exist, it is incumbent upon the proposers to justify the creation of yet another, incompatible signature algorithm.

It is therefore my recommendation that the specifications council communicate something like this position to the membership to guide their vote about this working group:

The OpenID Specifications Council recommends that members reject this proposal to create a working group because the charter is excessively broad, it seems to propose the creation of new mechanisms that unnecessarily create new ways to do accomplish existing tasks, such as digital signatures, and it the proposal is not sufficiently clear on whether it builds upon existing mechanisms such as AX 1.0 in a compatible manner, or whether it requires breaking changes to these underlying protocols.

We, as a specs council, have an obligation to promptly produce a recommendation prior to the membership vote.  My stab at our recommendation is above.  Wordsmithing welcome.  If you disagree, please supply alternate wording that you think we should use instead.

                                                                -- Mike


From: David Recordon [mailto:recordond at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 10:20 AM
To: Nat Sakimura
Cc: Mike Jones; specs-council at openid.net
Subject: Re: [OIDFSC] FW: Proposal to create the TX working group

To update Nat's note, the proposal is actually at http://wiki.openid.net/Working_Groups%3AContract_Exchange_1 (the wiki doesn't like periods in URLs).

While the number of specifications listed has been reduced, it still feels nebulous in terms of what will be produced as laid out by the purpose and scope.  For example, the scope says that the working group will develop "A Public Key Cryptography based digital signature method", but isn't it already defined how to sign chunks of XML?  Why would the working group be developing a new signature mechanism?

--David
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Nat Sakimura <n-sakimura at nri.co.jp<mailto:n-sakimura at nri.co.jp>> wrote:
The most current version is here: http://wiki.openid.net/Working_Groups:Contract_Exchange_1.0

Since AX 2.0 WG is spinning up, I have removed it from the possible output of this WG.

=nat

Mike Jones wrote:

Forwarding this note to the list to kick off the actual specs council work on this spec...

[Deleted the rest of the thread to bring the message below the current 40K list size limit]

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