Project acronym: QUESTION-HOW
Project Full Title: Quality Engineering Solutions via
Tools, Information and Outreach for the New Highly-enriched Offerings
from W3C: Evolving the Web in Europe
Project/Contract No.
IST-2000-28767
Work package 3, Deliverables D3.2, D3.3 and D3.4
Project Manager: Daniel Dardailler
<danield@w3.org>
Author of this document: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
Date: Thu, Aug 22, 2002.
An earlier report on W3C Office Coverage ("Analysis of W3C Office Coverage in Europe") gave an overview of the Internet presence as well as the presence of W3C in the European Union countries. That paper also outlined the plans for regionalization and for new W3C Offices. The present document reports on the regionalization activities; an accompanying report, for deliverables 4.1 and 4.2, reports on new offices.
The report mentioned above outlined the plans for three regionalized offices for 2002, namely:
These regional offices replace the previous UK, German, and Dutch offices, respectively. Each of these offices were launched in combination with the Interop Tour event (Work package 6): the cities for these events were chosen to be in one of the "new" regions (Dublin, Vienna, and Brussels, respectively) thereby combining the publicity gained by the event proper with the announcement of the regional offices. This was also reflected in the Press activities: on the 21st of May, W3C issued an international Press Release which announced both the interop tour events and the regionalization itself. Following the usual W3C pattern, this press release was published in English, French, and Japanese by W3C; this time it was also synchronously translated and published in Dutch, German by the relevant offices. The regionalization was also announced on the home page of W3C as well as the Offices' page at W3C (see the W3C and the Office page news archives). Finally, the regionalization was also announced at the AC meeting of W3C, in May 2002.
All three regional offices have
w3c.at, etc)
Obviously, the work is still ongoing.
The office is hosted at CLRC, near Oxford. It previously acted as the UK Office of W3C. W3C has some important members in Ireland (Baltimore technologies, Iona Technologies) who also gave a help to the Oxford team in organising the opening event on the 30th of May, in Dublin.
The office will also be responsible for the organisation of the EuroWeb'2002 conference, in December 2003. The International Programme Committee of the conference also includes several persons from Ireland, who will help in reinforcing the office's presence in the new region.
To avoid misunderstandings: the Euroweb conference is not part of the Question-How project.
The Office is hosted at the Fraunhofer IMK institute (former GMD) nearby Bonn. It previously acted as the German Office of W3C.
At present, there aren't many Austrian members of W3C. However, the Office could build up excellent relationships with one of the local members, namely the Electronic Commerce Competence Centre, which played an active role in the organisation of the opening event, which took place on the 28th of May, in Vienna. It can be expected that this relationship will help in gaining a better presence of the Office in Austria. Note that the participants of the opening event were also welcome by Frau Mag. Sabine Pohoryles-Drexel, from the Austrian Ministry for Industry and Work.
The Austrian W3C domain (w3c.at) has already been acquired
by the Office; the web site, the mailing lists, etc, can use both the
Austrian and the German domains.
The Office is hosted at CWI in Amsterdam. It previously acted as the Dutch Office of W3C.
There are some major Belgian and no Luxembourg members of W3C. The Office began to build up relationships with various organisations in Belgium (eg, the Belgian/Luxembourg XML Users' group, the local section of ISOC, etc) to extend its presence in Belgium. The users' group gave some help, primarily in terms of publicity, for the opening event which took place on the 3rd of June, in Brussels. The Office has also built up some contacts with individuals in the Belgian academic world, and there are ongoing discussion to set up some sort of contractual framework to act as a local help for the Office.
The Benelux Office is particular in the sense that it covers a multilingual area (French and Dutch) with also a strong presence of English. As a consequence, it was decided that the main web site of the office would be routinely multilingual: French, Dutch, and English. The web site is set up to make use of content-negotiation: the language preference of the visitor's browser will decide which version is shown first (with explicit links on the site to the other versions)
Attempts have been made to acquire the Belgian domain but, unfortunately,
the w3c.be domain has been acquired by another organisation
some years ago. Discussions are ongoing to try to solve this problem.
Each regional Office maintains a list of their respective W3C membership: