On TPAC 2013

Earlier this month W3C had its first Technical Plenary (TPAC) in China. During TPAC week, 450 people meet in groups and breakout sessions to address the most technical and strategic topics raised by the participants. We renew friendships and meet new colleagues.

We met in Shenzhen this year in part because we have seen a rapid increase in participation by Chinese organizations in W3C in the past several years. With the growing significance of the Chinese web community in the global web —591 Million Internet Users and growing— we are seeing increased innovation occurring within the Chinese web technical community. Forging strong links to that community is essential to maintaining global Web interoperability. I want to thank everyone who traveled to China for this important gathering, and to our hosts in China who made the event a success, including Tencent for their generous sponsorship.

Several events took place alongside TPAC which allowed even broader engagement with China. Tim Berners-Lee and Judy Brewer participated in Tencent's WE summit, I presented at an IPR forum, and 250 people participated in our Test the Web Forward event, a day full of collaboration around Web quality.

To get the flavor of what we discussed during the week, I recommend the W3C highlights report prepared for the Membership, and the summaries of the Wednesday breakout sessions, driven unconference style.

One topic stood out during the week: Web security. I had joined CEOs of other Internet technical organizations in expressing concern about the loss of trust that has occurred in reaction to pervasive surveillance. On the heels of the IETF's decision to address security issues the previous week, we spent several hours identifying work areas for W3C related to Web security. Some of this discussion can be found in the results of our web security breakout, which will now be looked at by the Web Security Interest Group.

Lastly, we shared ideas for our upcoming work agenda. In particular, we have begun to plan W3C Workshops for the first half of 2014 on Web Payments, Web and TV (our fourth Workshop), Hardening the Internet (with the IETF), Linking Geospatial Data, Web of Things, and Performance.

We have already begun discussions of TPAC next year, which will take place in Santa Clara, California at the end of October. We will soon be announcing plans for a public symposium on the Web's 25th anniversary and W3C's 20th, which will take place during TPAC week.