W3C Systems Team

Our mission is to provide the tools and infrastructure to make the W3C experience easy and the most effective.

After years of accumulating homegrown tools that have served the consortium for decades, we want to accelerate the migration from those legacy tools and embrace modern tooling used by the industry and customize them for our needs.

This effort started with:

• The revamp of the TR Publication process
• The move to GitHub as a collaboration platform for standard development
• The work to retire legacy tools
• New initiatives

TR Publication

A (not so) long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

• Publication was a manual process (which required the use of CVS)
• Staff Contact was a critical path
• Requests had to be sent by email to W3C Webmaster
• Multiple causes of delay:
  • Staff contact availability
  • Publications only allowed on Tuesday and Thursday
  • Back and forth between Webmaster/Staff Contact/Editor to fix documents
  • Interrupted by Publication moratorium

This was a long and painful journey for WGs.

TR Publication - A New Hope

How we improved it

Systeam objective: Streamline this process

• Wrote Specberus - a new publication rules checker, faster and scalable
• Collaborated with editing tools maintainers (Bikeshed and respec) to improve compliance of generated docs
• Developed Echidna - a framework for automating publications
• Enabled continuous publication with GitHub, Echidna & Travis CI
• Exposed groups and publications data within the W3C API
• Recently, enhanced Echidna to support Candidate Recommendations

TR Publication - Success!

Objective accomplished!

• Faster, easier and more regular publications
• Removed dependency on Staff resources for publishing
• Reduced gap between Editors' drafts and /TR

Systeam tools (specberus, echidna) are open source, contribute to improve them!

GitHub

A collaboration platform for standard development

• Almost all W3C groups have moved their specification work to GitHub
• Now a critical component of our infrastructure

Statistics of the W3C organization in GitHub

• 625 Repositories
• 899 People
• 253Teams
• 810 Connected Accounts (W3C⬌GitHub)

GitHub - Shortcomings

What are we missing?

• Better integration between the W3C and GitHub ecosystems
• Easy way to retrieve the various repositories of a given group
• Monitoring of activity happening in GitHub
• For Chairs and Staff contacts, automated management of repository members (new participants onboarding, automatically grant/revoke access)
• Help with repository configuration
• Additional tooling to ease specification development

GitHub - Integration plan

How Systeam is addressing shortcomings

• Improving integration with the W3C website
  • Connected Accounts (linking a W3C Account and GitHub identity)
  • Making it easier to manage W3C website content using GitHub
• Aiming for consistency in our usage of GitHub
  • Repository Manager to ensure proper IPR commitments
  • Repository Validator to ensure consistency of configuration
  • Running daily backups of GitHub data
  • Contributing to the W3C on GitHub documentation
  • Mandating 2FA for organization owners to increase security

GitHub - Next steps

• Normalize tooling for WG work
  • Move remaining specification repositories to GitHub
  • Improve indexing and accountability of repositories
• Automate maintenance tasks (reduces Staff and Chairs admin work)
  • Consistent labels; Management of access rights; Procedure for archiving
• Ease and accelerate specification development (facilitates Editors and Chairs work)
  • PR Preview; Specification Snapshots; Continuous Integration; Transition from CG to WG; Director's transitions; Specification Errata

Legacy Tools

As our groups are moving to GitHub, we are considering retiring the following services and we would like the input from AC and Chairs:

• dev.w3.org - W3C Public CVS Repository
• dvcs.w3.org - Mercurial repositories service
• Bugzilla - Public Bugzilla service

Earliest possible retirement date would be 1st April 2019
(Migration or archival of legacy content will require coordination with the impacted groups)

Retirement of legacy services reduces our administration overhead, and allows us to focus additional resources to new projects.

Support for big meetings

Regular enhancements to the remote participation experience

• May 2018 AC Meeting: we experimented with video feed of the speakers
• Oct 2018 AC Meeting: we are providing 2 video feeds for speakers and slides
• Today: in large rooms we use the in-room audio system directly connected to WebEx. This offers an increased sound quality

For TPAC 2019 we aim at streamlining meeting registration process

• Today: we offer faster credit card payments for on-site registration
• Objective: Support Web payments (Payment Request API & Alipay)
• Objective: Better integration between registration and payment systems

New Initiatives

• Globalization work with DevRel Team to provide a new Translation infrastructure
• Calendaring
  • In May, the AC requested a W3C wide calendaring system
  • We collected requirements and sent them to the chairs in August. They are now stable
  • Our plan is to open this in beta in the next 4 months
• W3C API: Plan to make more data available publicly, new features enabling easier filtering/sorting/querying
• Operational efficiency: Sysreq queue reduced from 400 to 40 open requests in 3 months