AB/W3C-strategy-development

This is one of the AB/2020-21 Priorities.

This document is work in progress.

Introduction

Organizational/Corporate Strategy is defined by the following

The direction: long term Vision and mission and short term to mid term strategic goals.
Identity of the organization: It answers the question who we are?
Values of the organization (principles).

W3C is more than an organization, it is a community. Therefore W3C community as well as W3C team/staff should have common understanding of the organization strategy. W3C already has vision and mission, which is quite broad. But does not have the strategic goals and strategic plan for effectively directing the community and the team towards the long term goal. We need to understand the changing environment, changes required in the mid term direction, and then determine what changes we need to do in the long term direction of the organisation.

Approach

There are different approaches of strategy development, many sources of information suggest a straight forward top down approach from bird's eye view, which starts from creating vision and mission and then comes down to strategic goals and objectives along with creating identity, core values. But strategy development of a well-established organization is a more complex process. Mintzberg explained that strategy development is similar to a potter creating a pot of clay. It involves thinking from many directions and iterating the improvements. Strategy development process for a well-established organization is somewhat similar, which involves both bottom up and top down approach. Many times it is the tacit knowledge and patterns at the ground level that shape the future of the organization. Therefore the starting point for us is collection of information. W3C has established patterns, successes, perspectives, identity etc. The first step is to construct the strategic goals and identity of W3C. The next step is to determine what changes do we need to make in the direction, identity and core values/principles for making W3C more successful in the future.

Fundamental Elements

We need to answer some fundamental questions for developing the organization strategy. All of these questions are interconnected.

Who we are?
What is our purpose?
What do we want to achieve?
Whom do we serve?
What are our core values / principles?

Components of organization strategy as per W3C work structure

Direction, goals and objectives

The Hierarchy is as follows:

Vision: The state or destination that the organization aspire to achieve in the future.
Mission: Represents long term goals of the organization and how we intend to achieve.
Strategic goals: These are collective goals for both W3C management and W3C community. In order to avoid micromanagement, the board should avoid going deeper for strategy development.
Work plans: It includes objectives of W3C team and work of community in working groups/Business groups/Community groups.

Who we are (Identity)?

We collected feedback of the community and W3C team and formulated the following answers for the fundamental questions.

We are a unique forum where diverse voices from around the world and industries come together, incubate and build consensus for global standards for web technologies.

We work with consensus based model which provides equal opportunities to the representatives of organizations and user groups of small to big sizes, from different segments of the industries and different parts of the world to bring their perspectives and ideas on the table.
We are socially responsible and committed to ensure that web works for everyone. We strive for diversity and inclusion of the participants from different geographical locations, gender identities, accessibility needs, minority communities etc., we have process driven approach for ensuring accessibility, internationalization, security and privacy) in the standards, and encourage inclusive implementations.
We are committed to developing open and royalty free standards with high focus on interoperability, social responsibility and collaboration with other standards organizations.
We focus on coherently growing the architecture of the web from the core needs of the web to specific needs of various web-related industries, such as telecommunications, publishing, media & entertainment, and financial services.
We invest resources to ensure the progress in the areas which are important according to our guiding principles but are usually overlooked or neglected e.g. accessibility, internationalisation, security privacy etc.

Please provide your further inputs on "members-only GitHub issue 23".

What is our purpose of existence?

This is the most important foundation that provides high level guidance to the organization.

Ensure that web is for everyone (Accessibility, internationalization and global access).
Ensure royalty free standards and guidelines.
Provide an open forum for discussions for organizations of all sizes (from single person company to multinationals.
Ensure that standards are developed with consensus of industry and key stake holders, such that the work of big companies do not become de facto standard.
Maintain and develop the unified web architecture, which continues to address evolving use cases.

Please provide your further inputs on "members-only GitHub issue 52".

Whom do we serve?

Please comment on "members-only GitHub issue 47"

Our principles (core values)

These are the common principles of the W3C community and W3C team. These provide identity to the organization and support the direction of the organization. For example, if diversity is one of your goal, you cannot achieve diversity if the people of your organization do not believe in diversity.

One web
Universality: accessibility, internationalization and global access
Diversity and inclusion
Trust: integrity, privacy and security
Web should be good for humanity
Openness and Interoperability
Users first
Balance and non-ownership (Standards activities are not exclusively dominated by any particular person, company or interest group, and we should continue ensure royalty free contributions)
Due process. Decisions are made with equity and fairness
Transparency
Broad Consensus
Collaboration and cooperation (among the members as well as with other standards organizations)
Collective empowerment.

The list also incorporates the important points from open standards principles.

Please provide your further comments on "issue 46" for improving the set.

Recommendations for vision and principles

Recommendations for improving vision and principles was provided on issue 130 on AB issue tracker.

Strategic Goals

1. Reinforce efforts on accessibility and internationalization for achieving the goal of web for everyone.

2. Ensure that evolving web platform and web technologies improve the integrity, security and privacy.

3. Evolve the extensible web architecture to empower industries and individuals to address the evolving user’s needs.

4. Reinforce efforts on incubation, make it more structured and improve consensus building among the key stake holders.

5. Achieve worldwide participation, diversity and inclusion for establishing W3C as representative of the worldwide community.

6. Further improve the environment and the Process for facilitating balance, equity and cooperation among the participating organizations and user groups from different industries and sizes.

7. Increase involvement of underrepresented key stake holders like representatives of end users, content creators, developers etc.

8. Establish collaborative relationship with other organizations in the domain of internet and web standards.

9. Establish the unique global brand identity for W3C, which highlights the following:

We are an open forum where diverse voices from around the world and industries come together, incubate and build consensus for global standards for web technologies.
We are socially responsible and committed to ensure that web is for everyone, we greatly emphasize accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security and diversity.
We are committed to developing open and royalty free standards with high focus on interoperability and collective empowerment.