AB/ABMeetCandidates2023/AB Candidate Questionnaire/Avneesh Singh

What priorities should the AB take on in the next year? How will you help accomplish them?

Firstly the current model of priorities comes from previous era, when W3C had no board of directors and a different kind of leadership. I believe that we need to revisit the way we identify and work on priorities. The role of AB is changing. The BOD has ultimate responsibility for W3C without getting into details of technical agenda. Therefore AB has more member oriented or community oriented role for facilitating the technical agenda. I believe that members should have a voice in deciding the priorities. Also, the priorities based model does not capture the short term assignments that AB takes over for example W3C council. So, the better question is how I will contribute to AB’s work. The following are the areas of my focus:

• Leverage my experience and education in strategic management to continue to the work on Vision, principles and purpose of W3C.
• Leverage in my experience of executive management for establishing fruitful collaboration among the BOD, W3C management, TAG and AB.
• Leverage my experience of managing a community based organization for listening to the members and community, and contribute to transformation of W3C to community driven organization.
• One of the most important new responsibility is W3C council. I would like to contribute to it, and help in improving the procedure for council for making it more efficient and for earning more trust of the community.
• Another important piece is contributing to the ongoing goal of diversity and inclusion. We have big opportunity to make a difference in this area because we are creating a new W3C, we have great opportunity to shape up our policies, working modes and business models accordingly.

The AB positions are unpaid but require regular meetings at inconvenient times/locations, preparation for said meetings, and collaboration with people you might disagree with. Why do you personally wish to take this on?

Firstly I am a mission driven person working for a mission driven non-profit, so a cause and mission always attracts me. We had extensive discussion with some members of W3C and DAISY management for the question: should I continue to invest my time in W3C as AB member. And its result was that W3C is at a critical stage, and there is a life time opportunity to transform W3C into a community driven and mission driven organization, for ensuring that web is for the whole humanity, and my unique skills-set is very important for this goal. It is very clearly visible that I bring a very different insights to AB. This is because I come from a very different background.

• I have extensive experience of running an international non-profit which is also a membership based organization and does a lot of work through volunteer contributions, We face similar kind of resource constraints as W3C, in fact our budget is smaller than that of W3C and we accomplish our mission.
• I bring in worldwide perspective from a very different level because I am involved in grassroots initiatives in developing countries and standard organizations in the developing countries.
• I have been leading technical standards development as well as working with boards for more than a decade, and I have experience of transforming DAISY board into highly mobilized board which works with consensus.
• I am a non-native speaker of English with accessibility needs which helps in elevating the diverse needs.

Therefore I would like to continue my unique contributions to AB’s work for at least another term, and help W3C through this transition period.

Attending meetings is not enough to be an effective member of the AB. What else do you expect to do to contribute to the AB's activities?

Ans: It is already answered in question 1. Giving an example, when I started work on organization strategy of W3C, a huge amount of work was research, collecting views of community, team, documenting it, then massive debates in AB for achieving the alignment. Most of this work is invisible, but it shaped it into a nice vision document driven collectively by AB members. The legal entity work greatly diverted our focus in last two years, but I am glad that we are getting back to our original work. I would like to continue work on:

• Vision, principles and purpose of W3C.
• establishing fruitful collaboration among the BOD, W3C management, TAG and AB.
• W3C council. I will like to contribute to it, and help in improving the procedure for council for making it more efficient and for earning more trust of the community.
• goal of diversity and inclusion. We have big opportunity to make a difference in this area.

How do you think W3C should build consensus in large groups, and can you speak to your ability & experience building consensus (at W3C or elsewhere)?

To build better consensus W3C culture needs to change for the better. We have good guidance in W3C for achieving consensus, so I would not like to repeat it. I would like to talk about the group which is usually left behind. The people who are not so vocal, may be due to their culture, may be due to language barriers, may be they are shy or may be due to some other reason silently end up making compromises. I have observed that some days or months after the decision is made, we come to know that these silent people are the most effected by the change. We need to improve our culture so that everyone can voice her/his concerns, and need to reach out to these silent members of our community to ensure that their concerns are heard.

The CEPC has helped in making us polite but more has to be done to increase cohesion among our hearts. What we really need to achieve is more mutual respect and creation of a more tolerant and welcoming culture. We already have good guidance for consensus building in general, I would add to it the soft aspects of communications and behavior. If we have good repo, trust, we have friendly relationship, and most important if we are working for the common goal, then we usually do not get into conflict, instead we see it as a difference of opinion for achieving the common goals, and it becomes easier to achieve consensus. One important principle to highlight is that we should not get into a situation in which a minority group feels cornered. If this happens again and again, it creates long lasting divide.

I have been leading standards work in three consensus based organizations: DAISY Consortium, then in IDPF and then in W3C. I have more than 17 years of experience of building consensus in standards groups and collaborative projects. In fact, every project in DAISY Consortium needs consensus among the members no matter if it is software or standards work.

The most interesting part is my work with DAISY board, where I was instrumental in transforming it into a highly mobilized board, which works through consensus. It may be surprising to hear that in last 10 years, I do not remember even one instance in which DAISY board ended up voting, the board members achieved consensus and never used the last resort of voting.

How can W3C improve its diversity and inclusion, and what is the role of the AB in improving those?

There are two pieces. One is improving diversity within our existing reach, and other is about expanding our reach to include more diversities.

One important missing thing is tracking our progress on diversity. AB should come up with a way of tracking what progress we are making in different axis of diversities on annual basis. It should initially include diversity in elected bodies, chairs, editors, leads of task forces and gradually we should find a way to expand it to participants. I am aware that the previous CEO had some matrix for elected bodies and management, we should enhance it and start using it actively. It will give us clear indication the progress we are making and how to improve it further.

We already know that the timing of the meeting has a massive effect on participation of our worldwide community. What a nice example is these meet the candidates meetings. For attending all of these three meetings, a person like me have to be up throughout night (meetings at 6:30 PM, then at 1:30 AM and then at 7:30 AM), while in some parts of the world these are at the time when people are usually awake. I am not the only one, there are many like me who consistently participate in meetings at odd times.

Another point to highlight is that by using English as the default language we are implicitly creating Burdon for non-native speakers, which increases even more if a non-native speaker is a person with different ability. Therefore we need to have more empathy and tolerance for them. As technology advances, it would also be good to explore use of live translations, which would reduce language barrier to an extent.

In fact if we have more people with diversity as chairs, as editors, in elected bodies, it will gradually increase the adaptation and acceptance in our community as a whole. I frequently hear an argument, we’ll all this is good but these people do not have so much free time, so let us trust the usual native speakers who have time. I think that this is unfortunate way of thinking. People carve out time if you provide them a compelling mission.

Another question that comes to my mind, are our members having a diverse workforce. Can we encourage our members to recruit more diverse workforce and send more diverse participants to W3C. We should find out a way of encouraging our members. For example by recognizing them.

Let us also talk a little about reaching beyond existing community. I had discussion with previous leadership of W3C, but it did not lead to clear direction. If we really want to expand for bringing in diverse participants, we really need to rethink about our business model. For expanding to under resourced areas, we have to prioritize participation over revenue. We definitely need revenue, but right now expectations of revenue is coming in the way of expanding in under resourced parts of the world. Now a new W3C is created with new leadership. so we have life time opportunity to improve the model for the better. In DAISY we successfully achieved it, this is why we are now present in more than 100 countries. I am quite deeply involved in developing the strategies for expanding DAISY to under resourced countries. I am optimistic that W3C can also achieve it.

There is a proposal for an AC Chair. What do you think of the idea? Who should do the job (not naming individuals, describe the role, position)

Chair has an explicit meaning in W3C. So, I am hesitating to use term chair. There are various functions expected from this role:

• Moderate the mailing list and make AC mailing list more friendly and open.
• Surface the important issues raised by AC to AB and help in resolution or inclusion in longer term planning of AB.

I think that the second is the role for AB members and AB need to figure out how to achieve it. We should avoid adding another layer between AC and AB. As I mentioned earlier, in new W3C AB should be more in touch with AC. This position should be mainly responsible for making mailing list more open, positive and inclusive. We should have at least two moderators/facilitators from different parts of the world. This will be helpful for time zones related issues, will bring wider understanding of the culture and languages aspects. The persons should be people oriented, Remain Neutral, have high empathy, ability to correct people without using hard tone, should have knowledge of W3C code of conduct.