A World of Stakeholders: Lessons from Global Outreach

A slideset summarizing our efforts to broaden global participation in and benefits from W3C's work.

Daniel Dardailler, April 2008, for W3C Track in Beijing, based on Worldwide Participation in the World Wide Web Consortium.

One Web for Everyone

"The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and Inventor of the World Wide Web.

Growing International Presence

• 3 Host sites: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, Massachusetts, USA), the European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics (Sophia-Antipolis, France) and Keio University (Shonan Fujisawa, Japan).
• A network of W3C Offices in 17 locations, including Australia, Benelux/Bénélux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Brasil, 中国(China), Suomi (Finland), Deutschland und Österreich (Germany and Austria), Ελλάδα (Greece),Magyarország (Hungary), ישראל (Israel), भारत (India), Italia (Italy), 한국 (Korea), المغرب (Morocco), Southern Africa, España (Spain), Sverige (Sweden), and the United Kingdom and Ireland
• A multi-stakeholder organization open to entities from all over the world. Hundreth of Members from all more than 40 countries. Hundredth of Invited Experts from even more regions and countries.

Accountable to the Global Public

• W3C is accountable to Members and to non-Members around the globe.
• All Working Groups maintain public Web sites and mailing lists.
• All draft standards documents available to the public at a very early stage.
• Public-participation Interest Groups for worldwide collaboration and community building via open email lists.
• A growing network of volunteers translators working on W3C standards and reports and press releases into multiple languages. The international press coverage of W3C's work is also extensive and expanding.

Global Standards as enablers

Substantive work in areas with the particular objective of enabling Universal Access to the Web.

• The Web Accessibility Initiative develops technology, guidelines, and tools to increase accessibility of the Web for people with disabilities.
• The Internationalization Activity makes it possible and easy to use W3C technology worldwide by breaking down barriers between the Web and our planet's many languages, scripts, and cultures.
• W3C's Mobile Web Initiative aims to make Web access from a mobile device as simple and convenient as Web access from a desktop device, critical for the developing world.

Removing economical barriers

• W3C's industry-leading Patent Policy promotes the creation of Web standards that can be implemented on a Royalty-Free basis.
• This policy allows the rapid development by Open Source community and Commercial ventures, from high income to low income regions alike, by removing financial barriers to the implementation of our Standards.
• In April 2005, W3C announced a unique program to substantially reduce Membership fees by 40 to 85% for small companies and not-for-profit organizations based in the developing world.
• See also our Mobile Web in Developing Countries and Digital World Forum initiative.

International Relations and Liaisons

• The Consortium maintain liaisons with over 40 national, international and regional organizations around the globe
• IETF, ISO, ITU, OMA, OMG, OASIS, OpenGIS, ICANN, Unicode, UN, IGF and many others.
• Our goals:
  • Improved Mutual Understanding of Web technologies
  • Better Web Standards.
  • More Widely Used Web Standards.

Conclusion

• A unique combination of characteristics among Standard organizations.
• Greater Opportunity for Everyone !
• Developing countries stand to benefit substantially
• The W3C Team, Advisory Board, Advisory Committee, Offices, and interested parties from countries around the world will continue to discuss, expand and implement the above measures.