AB/ABMeetCandidates2023/AB Candidate Questionnaire/Elika Etemad

Q1: What priorities should the AB take on in the next year? How will you help accomplish them?

• Vision - It's important for W3C to document its values and principles, to explain who and why we exist to ourselves and others and to help us make decisions that are grounded in those shared values and principles.
• Process - Once Process 2023 is completed, we will have finished three major revisions of the Process, and need to focus on their implementation:
  • Evaluating the Council's operations, and improving and documenting its practices, tweaking the Process if needed.
  • Following up to make sure groups adopt the accessibility and tooling requirements introduced in Process 2021.
  • Working with the Team to improve the chartering process: making it more straightforward, improving review processes, increasing collaboration, and reducing the timeline.
  • Addressing some disconnects between the Patent Policy and the Process.
• Liaison - A key role of the AB is functioning as a connection between the AC and Membership, the Team, and the Board; this is especially important in this era of transition.

I intend to support Chris Wilson (the editor) and the rest of my AB colleagues on the Vision development, and to take lead on Process-related development, as I have in the past 4 years.

Q2: 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?

I think it's misleading to say that AB positions are unpaid, as most (but not all) AB members are paid a salary and the time they spend on the AB is part of their job. The relevant question for those members is, why does your company wish to sponsor your time on the AB?

As my personal motivations: I believe that having a fully functioning, effective W3C is important for the balance of power on the Web and for ensuring that we have the best outcomes for all users of the Web. If W3C fails in its mission, then the future of the Web will be determined by the strongest companies and their own narrow point of view.

The wider-ranging input that the broader W3C community provides through our consensus process improves the quality of the Web platform for everybody. Making sure W3C continues to serve as a functional and valuable place to develop standards is an important contribution to ensuring the quality and equity of the Web platform.

Q3: 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?

I expect to spend time triaging issues and developing proposals, continue to to co-chair and co-edit the Process, improve documentation, and generally ensure the AB makes progress on the issues that matter.

Q4: 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)?

W3C builds consensus by listening to everyone, trying its best to understand all the concerns, and developing, to the extent it can, proposals that satisfy all those concerns. This requires gathering and processing feedback, taking it seriously, coming up with ideas that balance all of the input and design constraints, and communicating both what we are doing and why to be able to bring the most people on board.

I have a long track record of developing consensus-backed proposals in the CSS Working Group, and can also point to Process 2020 and Patent Policy 2020, which were major, originally controversial, revisions to the W3C Process that nonetheless passed AC review with 100% positive responses.

Q5: How can W3C improve its diversity and inclusion, and what is the role of the AB in improving those?

I think the #1 thing W3C can do to improve its diversity and inclusion is to improve its documentation to make it easy to find, easy to read, and easy to understand how to participate. True transparency isn't just making everything public, but also requires making it understandable.

I also think that the AB (and the Board) can improve diversity and inclusion by making sure our events and meetings are accessible to people with disabilities, to people worldwide, and to participants who have limited resources. The AB can help with planning events and developing guidelines; by encouraging the sales team and the Board to reach out to under-represented regions and industries; and by collecting and processing feedback from our community to make sure our events and processes are comfortable and easy to participate in for as many people as possible.

Q6: 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)?

There has been discussion of an AC Forum moderator or facilitator, specific to guiding discussion on that mailing list, which may be helpful. There are also many other roles that have been suggested for an "AC Chair", which are, according to the Process, split across the Team and the AB. For example, collecting AC feedback and processing it is a role of the AB; evaluating the consensus of the AC after an AC review is a role of the Team; helping newcomers onboard has often also been a function of the Team. I think maybe it would help to make some of these roles more explicit to the AC, to make the person(s) responsible more identifiable so that the AC knows who is doing what.