International Outreach, Standard Liaisons and Offices Executive Summary

This is an extract of the full report presented at the Advisory Committee Meeting 6 - 8 May 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada

• Introduction & General
• Liaisons
• Offices

Introduction & General

This executive summary is a new AC document presenting W3C activities in the area of International liaisons and our Office program. This data was previously included in the overall Management report.

These activities, among many others, reinforce the commitment from W3C to develop one Web for everyone. The focus is on spreading the W3C words beyond our usual geographical and Web community frontiers, pursuing the vision and plan outlined in the white paper "Worldwide Participation in the World Wide Web Consortium"and making it easier for new stake-holders to participate and be aware of W3C's work and values.

In the past 6 months, the most important achievements have been:

• 34 Members have joined under the program offering reduced Membership fees for organizations in developing countries, with a focus on India and China, where we created Offices in the past two years.
• The working language and the official version of W3C documents is U.S. English but W3C tries to reach as many people and organizations around the world as possible. Our volunteer Translations page now refers to 860 translations in 47 languages and since the last AC meeting, we published 24 new translations:
  • 4 Translations for Recommendations
  • 5 Translations for W3C Notes
  • 10 Translations for Internationalization Documents
  • 5 Translations for Tutorials, FAQs
• The first translation under the recently approved authorized translations policy has been completed, WCAG 1.0 in Catalan by the Universitat de Barcelona.
• On April 3rd, W3C released Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, allowing for easier localization and internationalization for a global audience. Read the press release and visit the Internationalization home page.

  Regarding events:

• The Mobile Web Initiative held a Workshop in Bangalore in early December 2006, as a means to bridge the "digital divide" and to leverage access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for populations in developing economies. A report on the findings and outcomes of this event is available.
• A third Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) was held on 13-14 January 2007, hosted by Bhrigus Software in Hyderabad, India. The focus of Voice Browser Working Group was on improvements to SSML to render under-represented languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Hindi.
• Two W3C Working Groups had meetings face to face in Beijing and Rio.

Liaisons

W3C maintains liaisons with over 40 organizations and interfaces with many others at various technical and diplomatic levels. The goal of our liaison tracking and surrounding activities is to better coordinate strategic approaches to important relationships, and facilitate the partnering decisions that W3C has to make on a regular basis.

A specific Task Force is operated within the Consortium staff to oversee the course of W3C actions in the area of Official Standard Liaison, that is, the relationship between W3C and governmental driven organizations like ISO, ITU, EU normalisation (ETSI, CEN), UN efforts like IGF/WSIS, National bodies (ANSI, AFNOR, etc), but also our political liaison activities with other internet organizations like ICANN, OASIS, Liberty Alliance, etc.

• On 30 January 2007, W3C and OASIS jointly released WebCGM 2.0 as a single open standard for CGM on the Web, approved by the membership of both organizations. The benefits of this cooperative work between W3C and OASIS go to developers and designers using new standard features and improvements in this critical technology. Read the press release.
• Liberty Alliance and W3C are about to sign an MoU to improve mutual awareness of work items and plans, in particular in the areas of privacy and security, and coordinating the participation of staff and members in each other's organization meetings.
• American National Standards Institute. W3C is involved in the ANSI Consortium Outreach Group (COG) at various levels, and will participate in a U.S. – China Symposium on Active Industry Participation in Standardization, on 30 May 2007 in Beijing, China.
• European Commission. W3C is still tracking the ongoing EU Study on the specific policy needs for ICT standardization in Europe, in the Information and Communication Technology Standards Board. a forum of European standardization bodies including EC representatives. W3C's Rigo Wenning, who also led our COPRAS effort with the main ICTSB partners (ETSI, CEN, CENelec), is organizing the ICTSB face-to-face meeting in Sophia Antipolis in November 2007. The ICTSB chair is now Kirit Lathia from Siemens and the hot topic is coordination around RFID.
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Daniel Dardailler and Thomas Roessler have served their terms in ICANN in 2006 (see acknowledgement). Daniel participated in the Lisbon ICANN meeting in March 2007, where discussions around internationalized domain names (and IRI) took place.
• Internet Engineering Task Force. The IETF and W3C communities collaborate through their public mailing list, public-ietf-w3c and regular meetings and using the IETF new-work list, along with IEEE, ITU, OMA and others. In March 2007, the IETF-W3C liaison call discussed HTTP, Charmod, and XML Security.
• The MWI Steering Council, in liaising with the Open Ajax Forum has agreed to jointly hold a Workshop on Mobile Ajax, user experiences, tools, need for standardization, etc. Timeframe is Summer 2007.
• W3C and Sun, in the context of the Java Community Process (JCP), have been liaising to integrate JSR 287 into the org.w3c package. This work will improve the support of JSR 280 and JSR 290 to enable Java for devices with reduced capabilities.
• Référentiel Général d'Interopérabilité, part of a new legal framework listing mandatory ICT Open Standards, largely dominated by W3C and IETF standards. Daniel Dardailler is tracking the activity of the Expert group in charge of the evolution of this document.
• United Nations Organizations. Daniel Dardailler is a member of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Advisory Group. W3C participates in the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards and tracks privacy work as well.
• W3C staff tracking eGovernment have met with the European Commission DG IT unit in charge of the European Interoperability Framework. More and more national governmental agencies are getting concrete about embracing open standards such as W3C's, and the examples of France or USA in this report are symptomatic of a real international trend.

Offices

To ensure that W3C continues to produce standards that meet the needs of the global community, W3C must broaden participation to include more stake-holders from around the world.

The W3C Offices play a key role in helping W3C reach these goals. They help understand and satisfy the linguistic and cultural requirements of many different communities and gain a better understanding of the technological problems deriving from linguistic and structural differences.

The institutions hosting our Offices receive a commission on the membership revenue in their region (25-20-15%, depending on the Member join date), which usually only cover extra expenses but not the human resource allocated to W3C (nor the Office overhead, building, etc).

Statistics

2006 was a successful year for Offices. In addition to the creation of a new Office in Beijing, China, the performance can be seen in a number of annual statistics.

• Recruiting: with an increase of 3 Full Members, 2 Intermediates, and 19 Affiliates/Dev Country members (which is +20%, +200%, +12%) there is significantly more growth in officeland than in W3C including Offices on average (+4%, +200%, +8%).
• Offices did 150 translations of pressreleases (into 17 different languages)
• 62 presentations where held on behalf of Offices
• ~50 events (symposia, conferences, fairs, tutorials) were either organized or supported by Offices or Offices maintained a booth.

Changes

After Daniel Dardailler took over as Head of Offices from Ivan Herman last year, a management team consisting of Klaus Birkenbihl, Daniel Dardailler (chair) and Mauro Nunez was formed to coordinate Offices activities.

Four Office institutes changed their Office management:

• Martine Roeleveld is successor of Frank Roos in the W3C Benelux Office,
• Yehoshua Sagiv takes over from Michel Bercovier in the W3C Israel Office,
• Encarnación Quesada Ruiz takes over from José Manuel Alonso in the W3C Spain Office (José joined the W3C team as a fellow of CTIC.)
• V.N. Shukla takes over from R.K. Verma in the W3C India Office.

Highlights Since Last AC Meeting

On 1 and 2 February the W3C Spain Office organized a European W3C Symposium on eGovernment. This event lays the ground for W3C's further work in the area of eGovernment.

W3C Offices held their recent annual face to face meeting on 5 and 6 February in Sophia Antipolis, France. Representatives of all sixteen W3C world Offices met to discuss W3C Membership issues, Office events and new staff, outreach, and plans for the future.

Together with the NJSZT (Janos Neumann Computer Science Association) the W3C Hungary Office organized a Webconference in Hungary (Magyarországi Web Konferencia 2007) for the second time.

The W3C Korea Office held its W3C Korean Members' Workshop on 13-14 April.

At the occasion of CeBIT 2007 Thomas Tikwinski from W3C Germany and Austria Office had an opportunity to write an essay on W3C for one of Germany's most renowned newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine.

New Southern Africa Office

On April 17th 2007, W3C announced the launch of its new Southern Africa Office, based at the Meraka Institute, a unit of CSIR, in Pretoria, South Africa.

An opening ceremony on 14 May at Meraka will mark the start of the new partnership between the two organizations.

This new Office, like UK & Ireland, or Germany and Austria, is a regional one, covering what is defined as Southern Africa by the UN and also the Southern African Customs Union. The list of countries is: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland.

Current List of Offices

Here's a map of our host and office presence World Wide, including our new Southern Africa Office region.

See the W3C Offices contact list for more details.

Future Offices

W3C is already in contact with organizations in many countries for potential new Offices in the coming years and as we're also ready to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the W3C Office Program in 2007. We're also thinking about the kind of expansion we want for the program in the future, and welcome feedback.

As food for thought, here is a table showing the creation years for our existing 17 Offices, and some potential countries or regions where we're missing a presence.

And the criteria we're considering for expansion:

• Internationalization of W3C, being truly worldwide
• Increasing membership in the region, better participation and transfer of knowledge from/about the region to W3C
• Raising W3C awareness in the region, through appearances, events organized by Offices
• Regional networking, especially with governmental agencies, eGov advocates
• Improving press contacts, local education and dissemination of our results
• Keeping the program under control, human and scalable.

Feedback welcome, as usual.