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Community & Business Groups

Digital Offers Community Group Charter

STATUS: This is a draft charter for the Digital Offers Community Group. The Community Group will discuss and amend it. To make this draft easier to read, we have omitted here all the boilerplate sections of the template starting with “Community and Business Group Process”; those sections will be added back in a future charter. The expectation is to use the full Community Group Charter Template for the version adopted by the Community Group.

Goals

The mission of the Digital Offers Community Group is to improve E-Commerce on the Web by making it easier and more secure for all actors in the ecosystem to manage, distribute, use, and settle digital offers, including coupons, vouchers, rewards, and loyalty programs.

Scope of Work

The Community Group will:

  • Study the digital offers ecosystem to understand technology barriers to the full potential of digital offers on the Web (including access from mobile devices).
  • Identify and prioritize opportunities to lower these barriers.
  • Analyze what enhancements to the Web would contribute to solutions.
  • Explore solutions by incubating technical work that might form the basis of future W3C standards.

Use Cases In Scope

When launched, the Community Group is expected to discuss a large number of use cases, including from a variety of industry segments and regions of the world. However, to make progress, the Community Group should rapidly prioritize use cases, according to a number of criteria, including:

  • Who is participating in the group, including both the parties with the best understanding of the use cases and implementers of potential solutions.
  • The opportunity for interoperability gains.

The Digital Offers Task Force of the Web Payments Interest Group has written a number of initial discussion topics. This list is not intended to limit the scope of topics that the Community Group may consider.

Out of Scope

  • The group will not develop a specification for coupon identifiers (e.g., represented through bar codes or QR codes).

Deliverables

  • A report describing a series of (prioritized) industry use cases.
  • An analysis of what standards (existing or new in the ecosystem as a whole) might help address those use cases.
  • Optionally: Community Group reports to experiment with how to address the use cases.

If the Community Group’s reports gain traction, then following W3C’s Recommendation Track Readiness Best Practices the Community Group may work with the Web Payments Interest Group (and other groups) to determine whether work should advance on the Recommendation Track in an existing or new Working Group.

Dependencies or Liaisons

Participation from key industry stakeholders will be critical to the success of the group. This includes:

  • Merchants and merchant associations
  • Consumer packaged goods (CPGs) companies that distribute coupons
  • Coupon aggregators
  • Digital wallet / payment app developers
  • Payment solution providers (e.g., POS vendors, shopping cart providers)
  • Standards bodies involved in digital offers (e.g., ARTS, Conexxus, GS1, JICC)
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