Introducing W3C

• W3C http://www.w3.org/ the home of (X)HTML, XML, CSS, RDF, the Web and Semantic Web ...
• ~400 members (the usual suspects, SMEs, users, grasroots ...) http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
• 65 groups doing the work http://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities
• 18 world offices all over the world http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/
• a team of ~55 individuals - working and living distributed around the globe - coordinated by 3 hosts
  • MIT, US http://www.csail.mit.edu/
  • ERCIM, Europe http://www.ercim.org/
  • Keio University, Japan http://www.keio.ac.jp/
• director: WWW inventor Tim Berners Lee http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

W3C Offices - the Start

W3C-LA

BRUSSELS -- 24 November, 1997 -- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today announced the launch of W3C-LA, a new initiative to promote W3C developments to leverage the Web for European industry. W3C-LA (Leveraging Action) is one of the European Commission's "Leveraging Actions for Software Technologies", sponsored by the Esprit programme.

...

W3C Offices

To enhance the communication between W3C and the Web community, W3C will open W3C Offices covering specific geographical areas. W3C Offices will be the first point of contact between the Consortium and its membership, as well as the general public in their corresponding region. CLRC-RAL has been established as the first W3C Office, covering the United Kingdom. Other Offices to be launched during the first quarter of 1998 include GMD (Forschungszentrum informationstechnik) in Germany, CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica) in the Netherlands, SICS (Swedish Institute of Computer Science) in Sweden, and FORTH (Foundation Of Research and Technology) in Greece.

W3C World Offices

• 
  
  1997 - EU and W3C decide to leverage W3C in Europe (W3C-LA)
• regional offices are part of the program recognizing that the outreach of the French host (INRIA at that time) faced language barriers
• promotion and establishment was by Jean François Abramatic and Bob Hopgood
• offices are located at research institutes and universities
  • neutral
  • rather knowledge than sales
• the offices program soon was exported to Asia and Australia
• today 18 international Offices

W3C World Offices today

W3C World Offices today

Australia (CSIRO)	Benelux (CWI)	Brazil (NIC.br)	China (Beihang University)	Finland (TU Tampere)
Germany and Austria (FH Potsdam)	Greece (FORTH-ICS)	Hungary (SZTAKI)	India (MIT-DIT)	Italy (CNR)
Israel (ISOC-IL)	Korea (ETRI)	Morocco (EMI)	Southern Africa (Meraka Institute)	Senegal (ESP)
Spain (CTIC)	Sweden (SICS)	UK and Ireland (STFC RAL)	more to come ...	more to come ...

Was it a success?

One succes criterion for Offices is the membership development in their region

Evidence for Offices impact?

Today

All countries mentioned in this list - except Switzerland and Canada - have an W3C Office or W3C Host presence today

Offices roles

• Recruit stake-holders in the region
• Provide support for existing W3C Members in the region.
• Provide feedback to W3C on regional issues (for example, in support of W3C's Internationalization Activity).
• Promote the adoption of W3C Recommendations with a particular attention to the local languages and cultures.
• Initiate translations and help others translate W3C materials and promote their dissemination.

Offices creativity

• the Semantic Web Tour in 2003
• annual W3C days
• symposia on W3C topics to discuss with local communities
• co-organisation of international conferences
• the W3C bus (Spain 2004)
  • W3C Standards Tour
  • stopped of one or two days in various university cities in Spain
  • established contact with researchers at Universities
• the W3C books <edition W3C.de> (Germany 2002)
  • W3C Standards in German commented by the translators
  • two nice books (sold out)
    • XML & Co: Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 (4. Februar 2004), Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 XPath Spezifikation (31. März 2003), Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1, Candidate Recommendation (15. Oktober 2002), Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, Zweite Auflage (6. Oktober 2000), Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (10. Februar 1998), XML-Schema Teil 0: Einführung (2. Mai 2001), XML-Schema Teil 1: Strukturen (2. Mai 2001), XML-Schema Teil 2: Datentypen (2. Mai 2001), XSL-Transformationen (XSLT) 1.0 (16. November 1999), XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0 (16. November 1999), Namensräume in XML (14. Januar 1999), XML Information Set (24. Oktober 2001), XML Base (27. Juni 2001), XLink 1.0 (27. Juni 2001) and Verknüpfen von Style Sheets mit XML-Dokumenten Version 1.0 (29. Juni 1999).
    • XHTML, CSS & Co: XHTML+MathML+SVG, Working Draft (9. August 2002), XFrames, Working Draft (6. August 2002), XHTML 1, Zweite Auflage (1. August 2002), XHTML 1.1 (31. Mai 2001), Modularisierung von XHTML (10. April 2001), XHTML Basic (19. Dezember 2000), HTML 4.01 (24. Dezember 1999) and Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (12. Mai 1998).
  • complete text available on the Web
• Café with Browser (Brazil 2009)
  • forum for free talks with developers, researchers and the browser industry
  • Opera, Mozilla, Microsoft have already been there
  • videos and slides online
• actively involved in research on the technologies

Challenges

• better synergies with hosts
  • acquisition of local projects
  • better use of branding
  • identifying common topics
  • cooperation in research and development
• closer contact with local communities
  • harvest of voluntary work
  • acknowledgement and coordination of voluntary work
  • joint events while maintaining neutrality
  • cooperation with other Internet organizations
• Offices in developing countries
  • different needs and priorities in technologies
  • usually less resources and other Office host requirements
• better global coverage
  • some big countries are still missing
• Offices management
  • better cooperation between Offices to avoid double work
  • how to manage 40+ Offices

Move of the W3C Germany and Austria Office

• Welcome (back), Felix Sasaki
• Let's do great work together, Fachhochschule Potsdam
• Thank you, Thomas Tikwinski and Fraunhofer IAIS

Closing remark

Being W3C.de/at Office staff does not require a specific hairstyle ...

Klaus Birkenbihl

Henning Fischer

Thomas Tikwinski

Felix Sasaki