An Open Platform for

Planning,
Developing,
Publicly Discussing,
Finding Consensus,
Publishing,
Disseminating, and
Maintaining

Open IT-Standards:

WWW

Potsdam, Germany 2007-07-04

Introducing W3C

W3C http://www.w3.org/ the home of (X)HTML, XML, CSS, RDF, the Web and Semantic Web ...
400+ members (the usual suspects, SMEs, users, grasroots ...) http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
invited experts and volunteers
65 groups doing the work http://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities
17 world offices all over the world http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/
a team of ~60 individuals - working and living distributed around the globe - coordinated by 3 hosts
- MIT, US http://www.csail.mit.edu/
- ERCIM, Europe http://www.ercim.org/
- Keio University, Japan http://www.keio.ac.jp/
director: WWW inventor Tim Berners Lee http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

a very open and transparent process to form consensus http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/
responsive to the public
a transparent patent policy http://www.w3.org/2004/02/05-patentsummary.html that protects IPRs and promotes proliferation of standards
standards are available for free (might be essential for their success!) - find all of them here: http://www.w3.org/TR/ (and use and implement!)
any other info please read: About W3C http://www.w3.org/Consortium/

everything is on the web
- if its not on the Web it does not exist!
- paperless
- history - archiving and versioning by CVS!
- proof of concept
- gives us feedback (about use)
eat your own dogfood!
- use standards for your work wherever you can
- be your own usecase
- store your ideas on the server - there you can refer to them
conform to standards - no cheap excuses please!
- credibility
- no tools???
document your communication - use mailinglists and logged IRC
be open to new applications of standards
- RSS feeds
- WIKIs
- Blog!
- use Semantic Web applications
- ...
go public - listen to the public - response to the public
- its not necessary to be a member to submit ideas (though it helps)
- member or not - you are invited to contribute

Finding new Ideas
- make a (members) Submission http://www.w3.org/Submission/
- organise/go to a Workshop http://www.w3.org/2003/08/Workshops/
- set-up an Incubator Group to develop ideas http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/
Getting things started
- team drafts a charter for a group http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2007Jun/
- identifying team-contact and chair
- get the "go" from the membership
working along
- publish working drafts from the working group
- discuss with members and the public
- promote to (candidate/proposed) recommendation (aka standard)

work is done in meetings (either face to face or - mostly - on phone) working group tools: http://www.w3.org/2004/12/wg-tools
- logged IRC (RFC1459 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt) for minuting
- Semantic Web Based Tool "Zakim" meeting and phonebridge management http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot.html
- an "RRSAgent" agent to draft meeting minutes http://www.w3.org/2002/03/RRSAgent
- Action tracking, Issue tracking
Outside meetings working groups use
- public and members only mailing list (100s) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/
- Wikis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
- Blogs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
- IRC (RFC1459 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1459.txt) for instant messaging
- action tracking http://www.w3.org/2005/06/tracker/ , issue tracking ... http://esw.w3.org/topic/TrackingIssues
- WBS: Web-Based Straw-poll and balloting system http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/
- ...
publishing about the results disseminating the results
- "pubrule checker" http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules
Quality - life after rec
- validators http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/#validators
- test suites z.B. http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20061213/ oder http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#browsers
- tutorials http://www.w3.org/2002/03/tutorials
- lists of implementations (see respective working group or activity pages)
- translations database (SW based) http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/
- talks database (SW based) http://www.w3.org/Talks/
- ...

could not mention all
- maybe I fogot some important
- e.g. Slidy http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy/ the tool that I use for my slides
technology makes life easier
we reach the community (4Mio hits/day on http://www.w3.org/)
people can access
- fast
- search
- lots of additional information
because everthing is on the Web
many tools are available open source

Undust the bottles!

(from Thomas Roessler's talk)
Most links are embedded in the slides of this talk: http://www.w3.org/2007/Talks/0704Berlin-KB/
Related talks:
- Thomas Roessler, W3C Process and Tools 101 http://www.w3.org/2007/xmlsec/w3c101
- Dan Connoly W3C Process: A Means to an End - http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/04w3c-process/all