> Membership Fees in Developing Countries

Status of this Document

This document has been superseded. Please refer to the W3C Fees page.

This document describes the fee structure for organizations in developing countries joining as Members of the World Wide Web Consortium. Reduction of fees is one part of a larger program to increase participation of and outreach to people and organizations in developing countries.

Description

The World Bank classifies countries as :

• Low Income (LIC)
• Lower Middle Income (LMC)
• Upper Middle Income (UMC)
• High Income (HIC)

The comprehensive data for the categorization of countries can be downloaded from a page of classifications managed by the World Bank  (converted to HTML for W3C’s purposes; see also some examples below). Using this data, a multiplicative factor (denoted by 'M' in what follows) is defined and is used to establish the final fees. The factors are:

Using these factors, the complete Membership fee algorithm is is given below for Non-Profit and Governmental institutions as well as for commercial entities. In both cases, the maximal Affiliate Membership fee for a specific country is denoted by 'F' (W3C Members are associated, for financial processing purposes, to one of its three Hosts: MIT, ERCIM, or Keio, based on the country of the Member's headquarters. Members based in Europe, Africa or the Middle East are associated with ERCIM; those in Japan or Korea with Keio; and all others with MIT. The exact amount of the fee depends on the Host association).

• Non-Profit and Governmental Institutions
  • Membership fee = M*F

• Commercial Entities
  • Let 'GAI' be the gross annual income of the company, expressed in US$ for the sake of the example (the exact threshold figure depends on the currency used by the Host the Member is associated with).
    1. If GAI > US$50,000,000, the fee = the Full Member fee for the specific country, regardless of its World Bank categorization.
    2. else if GAI < M*US$50,000,000, then the fee = M*F
    3. otherwise, the fee = F

Some Further Notes

• W3C checks and freezes for itself the World Bank categories once a year in January.
• Each member’s status is examined after three years and each year thereafter when possible changes in their fee is set..

Full Fee Tables

Examples

Here are some examples chosen among countries that W3C has already contacts with: