W3C Exec Summary
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an International Consortium
where Member and External organizations, a full-time technical staff, and the
public work together to lead the World Wide Web to its full
potential by developing Web standards such as protocols and
guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
- Goals: Interoperability, Universality,
Functionalities
- Neutral/nonforprofit, consensus based, open
participation, open results
- ~450 members, ~70 staff,
- ~50 Working Groups ~20 Coordination Groups and Interest Groups: ~1500
engineers, one process
- Hosting: MIT (America), ERCIM (Europe) and Keio
University (Japan) + 17 Offices
- Advisory Board, Technical Architecture Group
- Liaisons with 40+ other standards
bodies, Accountable to the global Public
What Open Standards means ?
A lot of debates nowadays for a common definition of Open
Standards(IGF, EC, etc)
- Transparent process
- Open participation
- Technical Consensus
- Running code
- Free and Persistent Specification
- W3C Patent Policy for Web Technologies
W3C Eating its own dog food!
W3C works with thousands of engineers using the Web and the Internet as a
platform.
- Emails, open archives (e.g. HTML5 WG)
- Web sites under w3.org (public, member, team)
- Web 2.0 applications (action item, issues tracker, web survey)
- Web DB tools (to manager participants)
- Instant Message (IRC) + bots for teleconferencing
- VOIP, slides in HTML/CSS, etc
Many using Semantic Web technologies on the server, and accessible to
participants with disabilities.
Like IETF, our process is one of our specification (bootstrap
principle)
W3C Results
W3C = Digital Ecosystem
- Considering the various definitions
- Not controlled
- Consensus based decision making
- Working for the common good of the ecosystem, for everybody in this
case
- We look autopoietic, our process defines replaceable roles, which
themselves define the process
- We allow for mixing of ecosystems (our members, vertical industries,
community), and our process is reused by others who also value
inclusiveness.
Web Future
The Web influences the world, and the world influences the Web.
IST: technologies + social convention + law
- decentralisation, inclusiveness -> scaling
- openess, trust -> reuse, fairness
- semweb -> open shared data -> trust, id, ipr
Things to remember: First Web browser was an editor too.
TimBL: If the Foundation achieves all the things I can imagine
now, we will have failed.
