W3C Community Groups
How To Effect Lasting, Global Change
Modus Operandi
- Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO of Digital Bazaar
- Dream: Make banking and finance radically open and transparent.
- Build the Web through Open Standards
- ... but how do you create global change?
If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.
Web Technologists
One of the best positions to enact global change.
... but how do you do this?
Vint Cerf
TCP/IP
Source: Stanford
Tim Berners-Lee
HTML, HTTP, URLs
Source: CERN
The Arab Spring - Tahrir Square - Mubarak Resigns
Source: Jonathan Rashad
Occupy Wall Street
Source: Paul Stein
The Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street was not a result of the Web.
- The Web accelerated the change.
- The Web changed the way we organize ourselves.
- The Web changed the way we think.
Standards
- The term "Standard" is misleading, sounds boring
- Deeply important social contracts
- An operating blue-print for society
The Standardization Process
- An organization has an idea for a technology and proposes it to the W3C or IETF
- Development of technology happens in Working Groups with public input
- Lots of arguing and politics
- Out pops the standard
Sausage Factory Standards Making Model
Source: National Library of Ireland on The Commons
- Corporation-centric vs. public-centric
- Incredibly difficult for an individual to introduce innovative work
- Innovating during standardization is bad
- Unfair to ask corporations to bear the cost of public innovation
The Problems with the Sausage Factory
W3C Community Groups
- No fees, open to the public - anyone can participate
- Light weight - easy to spin up
- No time limit - experiment, deploy, re-iterate
- Greatly increases probability of success
W3C Community Benefits
- Mailing list, wiki, issue tracker and blog
- Archived until the heat death of the W3C
- Attract people that are smarter than you.
W3C Community Group Case Study: Web Payments
Source: David Shankbone
- The protocol is closed, so is the network
- The entire system is centralized, slow and inefficient
- There is very little transparency
- The current system is not equitable
The Problems with Money and Society
Community Communication: MIC CHECK!
Source: David Shankbone
We the people,
need to change our
banking and financial systems to
be more like the Web -
open protocols,
transparent in design,
decentralized and secure.
Nobody should own
the network.
The fundamental mechanism
of sending money
to those we want to reward
and raising money from those
that want to support us
should be accessible
to all the worlds people.
W3C Web Payments Community Group
- PaySwarm - A simple Web standard for transferring money, buying and selling digital content, and crowd-funding projects.
- All designs and specs are open. All meetings are public, recorded and transparent.
- Decentralized by design - with a focus on speed, Data Portability and Fairness.
Start-up Timeframe
- Identified the core of what we're trying to do
- Created a W3C Community Group Account
- Proposed the Group
- Within 5 days, 20 people joined and we started work
Current Status
- A working implementation and demo site: http://dev.payswarm.com/
- Open specs for a REST-based API for performing financial transactions on the Web
- Working with and spawning other groups - RDFa, JSON-LD, Graph Normalization, Data-Driven Standards
- An engaged community with a clear purpose
Other W3C Community Groups
- Do-Not-Track Community Group
- Games Community Group
- Oil, Gas and Chemicals Business Group
- Web Education Community Group
- 30+ groups created in the past two months... and growing.
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
Comments and thoughts?
- Let's continue the discussion...
- Twitter - @manusporny
- http://www.w3.org/community/
- http://payswarm.com/