From Innovation to Standard

Today we introduce Community Groups as a place for developers to collaborate on next generation Web technologies. Our stakeholders have told us that a lightweight environment for innovation is necessary because the market evolves at such a rapid pace. We have designed Community Groups to lower barriers to participation, while at the same time maintaining our Working Groups for building broader consensus around technologies that are mature enough for standardization.

Community Groups:

• are open to all with no fee to participate
• quick to start and may continue indefinitely
• determine their own operations and internal processes
• create specifications under a permissive copyright
• provide royalty-free patent protection even in draft state

W3C's objective is to be a complete standards ecosystem for the entire Web community. With today's announcement, we create a new workspace for the developer community. We also announced today the creation of Business Groups to strengthen our partnerships with consumers of Web technology. And last year we established a partnership with ISO/IEC to address the portion of the Web community that seeks recognition of open Web standards by national bodies.

We continue to seek input from our entire community on these new offerings and other ways to better serve diverse interests and the long-term growth of the Web.