Robin Wilton's esoterica

Q: What's wrong with the WS-Fed TC draft charter?

A: "t [4+AF0AOw- that"

Q: That's it? Nothing else? Nothing else in the whole doc might need the slightest tweak?

A: No changes to the proposed WSFED TC charter are required.
 

As you may or may not be aware, a draft charter was proposed recently for a new TC (Technical Committee) at OASIS, to work on the WS-Federation specification which originated outside that standards body.

This has already been commented on by people far better qualified than me, including Tim Bray, Conor Cahill, Eve Maler, Paul Madsen and others. Among them you'll find experts in identity technology, federation, and many years of accumulated experience of the standardisation process. Each of their perspectives is well worth checking out.

Without diving into the politics of it all, I just want to make a single simple point. As part of the submission process, the OASIS membership is given an opportunity to comment on the proposed charter. As Gerry Gebel has noted here on the Burton Group blog, members who commented included Nokia, France Telecom, NTT, Sun, Oracle, and Neustar. It's clear that these too are entities with a great deal of technical and standardisation experience in this field. In all, 31 comments were submitted on the draft charter.

30 were rejected with the repeated formula:

"No changes to the proposed WSFED TC charter are required."

The fact that the only comment to be accepted was one remarking on a string of meaningless random characters which had somehow made its way into the text speaks for itself. None of the  substantive objections or concerns raised by the comments was acknowledged.

If you want to look at the comments and the corresponding replies, you can get the comment resolution document here.

The fact that half a dozen world-class corporations with a proven track record of expertise in online identity can have 30/30 comments rejected out of hand, at a point in the process when the TC doesn't even exist yet, surely serves to do nothing other than undermine the credibility of the draft charter and its proposers. As an exercise in flushing dubious motivations out into the open, though, it may have some merit.

Much is made these days of the claimed need for public sector bodies to share data about citizens, on an unprecedented scale and for a wide range of reasons.

A BBC investigative programme (enterprisingly titled "The Investigation") has been looking into the rationale for, and effectiveness of speed cameras in the UK. It says its findings cast significant doubt on both. For instance, academics compared the police statistics for serious injuries caused by road accidents with those generated by hospitals, and found that the two were substantially different... and that the hospital statistics showed no decline in road-related serious injuries since the introduction of speed cameras.

The article goes on to quote the Transport Research Laboratory's view that the real problem is a minority of drivers who are undeterred by speed cameras, and the former head of traffic police at the Met., who notes that speed cameras can only ever catch those people who are law-abiding enough in the first place to register their cars correctly and accurately.

With data sharing in mind, then, it would be interesting to see what the typical insurance history is of the people caught by speed cameras. I wonder what percentage would be found to have no record of accident claims.