April 2011 - Editor: Daniel Dardailler, Director International Relations, Associate Chairman, W3C.
The goal of this document is to lay out the activities and targets of W3C staff activities within the European Commission's reform of the European Union Standardization system.
In its 2004 Communication on the role of European standardisation, the Commission proposed to initiate a strategic review, together with Member States and stakeholders that would target how all players involved in ICT standardisation could better match the challenges of responding to societal and market needs.
The reform aims mainly to recitify some historic limitations in the area of
ICT Specifications and in the area of public procurement. Subsequent to a first
Draft, in April 2006, of a study on The specific policy needs for ICT
standardisation
with the objective to analyse the present state of the
European ICT standardisation policy and to present recommendations for its
future development, the European Commission established an accompagnying ICT
standardisation Steering Group. Via his participation in ICTSB, Rigo Wenning
(W3C Legal counsel) was elected to be a Participant in this Steering Group and
is an active and prominent Participant in the entire process.
The Steering Group participated in the elaboration and guided the contractors in writing the Report. The report is offline now. After the report was delivered, the European Commission DG Enterprise digested it into a White Paper that was published in the European Official Journal. The Commission Communication on standardisation and innovation announced the main subjects for the revision of ICT standardisation policy, adding that it would seek a broad agreement on its intentions before following up with policy proposals, in particular regarding the possible revision of Council Decision 87/95.
In its conclusions on standardisation and innovation, the Competitiveness Council of September 2008, also took the view that it would be very helpful for European standardisation bodies to exploit possible synergies with standardisation fora and consortia and endorsed the desire of the Commission to support a better use of standards in matters relating to ICT. As a result of this process, it was decided to prepare the present White Paper to ascertain the degree of consensus on the possible revision of ICT standardisation policy by submitting the results of the work to date to public consultation.
In 2011, the Commission submitted a legal package with the reform to the standardization system.
W3C is a non-profit international Standard Defining Organization (SDO) focused on Core Web technologies. It was started soon after the Web itself, led by the Web inventor, and still W3C director, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Administered as a joint partnership between three neutral academic hosts (ERCIM in Europe, MIT in the USA, and Keio University in Japan) and a network of national and region offices (11 in Europe, out of 18 worldwide), it provides a technical consensus building tool for the Web technical community at large, managing thousands of experts, all ruled by a single W3C Process. This due process, or by-laws, consists in a modern set of rules and constraints concerned with the creation, management, deliverance and maintenance of technical committees writing open specifications and accompanying tools, and it is regularly revised by the W3C community.
Voices against this proposal often mention as argument the fact that most consortia and fora and not very present in Europe. This memo explains that W3C is driven by an internationally recognized process, and a large community (staff, members, participants), more than 1/3 of it is European, working and living in Europe. It further adds that the Web has we know it today would not exist without the EC support and trust for the past 15 years. Not to mention the Web was born at CERN.
W3C also does some outreach, coding and training, but its main activity is delivering free and interoperable Web specifications, promoting and allowing better communication between individuals, companies, governments, everyone, using their preferred tools and platforms, with no vendor lock-in.
The UN/WSIS Declaration of Principles is particularly important. It states that:
Standardization is one of the essential building blocks of the Information Society." and "International organizations have also had and should continue to have an important role in the development of Internet-related technical standards and relevant policies."
This statement, coming from an UN ITU led initiative (WSIS, World Summit on Information Society) is a direct recognition of the success and impact the Internet and Web fora and consortia have had on ICT in the past decades, and an implicit recognition of our continued commitment to producing standards promoting universality, fairness, and decentralization.
This expectation is matched by W3C presence in several international bodies concerned with governance of the Internet and the Web. For instance, W3C is represented on the board of the United Nations IGF, or on the board of ICANN.
W3C has also been an ARO (Approved originator or normative references) within the ISO process since 2007, and more recently, in 2010, it gained ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS status. Several countries already directly recognize consortia specifications at government/official levels, often by ways of technical guides listing the W3C specifications they need, which is not the best solution in terms of evolution, but often the only one available given the context of prohibited Web standard referencing.
W3C is driven by a transparent, public and open process (compliant - inasmuch as we can self-evaluate it ourselves, since we're a bit out of scope - with WTO TBT practices, and already validated through the ISO criteria for ARO and PAS status), by working group participants and by a staff implementing this process, led by a Director, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web.
This process is itself revised by the community, under the care of an elected board of W3C members, a third of which are from Europe, and a majority of them having vested European interest (if not thousands of employees, think IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle).
Each W3C member, from the largest US software companies to the smallest one-person association in Iran, has the exact same rights once a W3C member: one seat, one vote.
For instance, the HTML platform, originally (last century) dominated by a few US browser companies, is now becoming a critical infrastructure layer for many industries, like phone, tv, car makers, privacy experts, health science, banking, etc, with strong industrial European interests, and HTML with its 500 participants (free participation for invited experts), is just one of the many activities of W3C.
Not to be forgotten, the role of the European Commission R&D framework in supporting W3C Europe (a third of the W3C worldwide technical staff) since 1995, through accompanying measures promoting the development and deployment of Web standards, has been determinant in many high profile W3C activities, such as Web Accessibility, Semantic Web, Privacy, or Mobile Web. The global standards that we have today on the worldwide market were made possible largely because of close alignment of W3C deliverables and EU strategic objectives expressed in the EC DG Information Society and Media framework programs. This system of financing is not ideal though, as it puts on the same competition grounds a non-for-profit standard setting organization like W3C Europe with hundreds of commercial SMEs in the business of making money on the Web.
In 2010, W3C has been particularly active and worked in close partnership with the EC DG Info units and cabinet on the Digital Agenda, which puts a strong emphasis on consortia's role in global and European ICT interoperability.
More than a third of the W3C staff works and live in the EU. W3C has 12 offices (out of 18 worldwide) and a host site (out of 3 worldwide) located in Europe, in partnership with some of the most advanced Euro ICT R&D centers (e.g. the ERCIM network).
At a management level, 3 out of 4 W3C technical domain leaders (area managers reporting directly to Tim Berners-Lee) are European.
W3C has a rotation policy (US/Europe/Asia) for its general assembly meetings and its technical committee alike, which brings our constituencies in Europe on a regular basis (e.g. our May 2011 all-members meeting is in Bilbao, the last one was in Lyon in November 2010).
W3C established a well known inclusive policy for usage, including its Open Document license and its Royalty Free Patent Policy promote both the wide distribution of these technologies and their implementation. The reality matches the theory here: there are hundreds of participants (not all W3C members) coming from Europe and working on a daily basis in consortium activities, bringing to the table new requirements and proposing solutions coming from various leading European communities (mobile, privacy, accessibility, semantic web, open gov data, etc).
In practice, W3C runs several dozen face-to-face meetings in Europe per year, with attendance from expert coming from all continents.
Although this sole act it itself will not resolve all problems of interoperability for public authorities, on the other hand, recognizing the work of the major Web and Internet consortia, like W3C, IETF, OASIS, Unicode consortium, would solve most of the interoperability and fragmentation issues we see today and are likely to face more seriously in the future. It's a case of 5% coverage giving a 95% solution.
The major risk of standard fragmentation comes from a wrong perception of informality/instability of Consortia work, and from the constraints imposed on national governments in referencing non de-jure ICT specifications.
A typical scenario is a national government mandating a Web standard for use in their procurement, and rather than just pointing at the widely recognized and implemented W3C specification, a local party is paid to make a copy of it, and modify it according to their understanding of local needs (even though the W3C standard was already developed and endorsed by many developers and users from this particular country/region). This local version of the standard, very likely incompatible with the existing tools provided by the ICT industry, may never be implemented, or be delayed by several months or years. Meanwhile, the local community will not see much progress, even though their taxes were spent on the issue. It was the case with Web Services and Web Accessibility, among others, with different effects. In the case of Web Services, given the strong business incentive, the gap was usually filled by programmers on both sides making efforts to solve the incompatibility issues, so it's just a delay. In the case of Web Accessibility, the size of a given national market is often not big enough for a special line of products, and in the end, no compliant products are available.
From the point of view of the software industry, this is a nightmare to manage, as potentially every country can adapt to their convenience core Web standards, forcing vendors to provide a specific local version, requiring new semantics, new programming, testing, delays, etc. And ICT prices will go up, naturally.
W3C is part of the overall reform process of the European standardization system. The recognition of W3C Recommendations in policy and procurement will be a major step towards a consistent legal framework that can take Internet development into account. It also allows W3C to better cooperate with the European Commission, not only in the area of research.