W3C

W3C Fact Sheet
April 2021

This report, dated 12 April 2021, was prepared for the April 2021 Virtual W3C Advisory Committee Meeting (W3C Member link). It accompanies the W3C Strategic Highlights – April 2021. For the previous edition, see the October 2020 fact sheet. Some links may be Member-only.

Membership, Staff

As of 12 April 2021:

  • 435 Members
  • 67 W3C Team members, who are full-time or part-time, amounting to 52.04 FTE (member-only link)
    • Staffing additions:
      • Marcos Cáceres (Project team, specifications, tools infrastructure, and developer relations/training, March 2021)
      • Pierre-Antoine Champin (Fellow, Strategy team, data interoperability strategist, February 2021)
      • Jay Kishigami (Management, Keio Deputy Director, November 2020)
  • W3C Fellows:
    • Pierre-Antoine Champin, ERCIM (Strategy)
    • Ivan Herman, CWI (Architecture & Technology)
    • Tanya Mandal, Internet Academy (MarComm)

Technical Reports

377 Technical Reports were published between 5 October 2020 and 12 April 2021. Please, read about the various types of documents published at W3C.

Other Types

  • 12 Candidate Recommendation Snapshots
  • 43 Candidate Recommendation Drafts
  • 241 Working Drafts
  • 43 Group Notes
  • 25 Retired documents

Strategy

The W3C Strategy function maintains the Strategy Team's Incubation Pipeline to coordinate among communities developing new work. We explore, investigate, and help incubate that work, evaluate its readiness for the standards-track, and shepherd chartering when ready.

The Strategy Incubation Pipeline tracks new activity:

Read more about the Strategy Team's Incubation Pipeline and contribute on GitHub.

Project

W3C succeeds only if it actually gets the work done that it is committed to deliver. The W3C Project function focuses on meeting all of the milestones of all of the groups, facilitating the work of Team Contacts, Chairs, and Editors to ensure that the work is moving forward appropriately, and driving the work necessary to achieve operational success.

  • 39 Working Groups
  • 287 active specifications are tracked:
    • 221 aiming to become Recommendations
    • 22 documents are planned to advance to Candidate Recommendation in the next 4 months
    • 23 documents are planned to advance to Proposed Recommendation in the next 6 months
  • The tracking of horizontal review comments has been revamped with the help of the Internationalization Working Group.
  • Work groups tools: chair dashboard, issue boards, and agenda helpers
  • New: aiming to provide more clarity regarding the various documents produced by W3C groups, the W3C Project team has started ClearSpec2021:
    1. Help the public differentiate documents produced by W3C Groups.
    2. Establish W3C Recommendations as the sole W3C Web standards (in comparison to other types of W3C documents)
    3. Document and inform about the level of adoption of various documents, including our standards.

Groups

A variety of W3C groups enable the Web Consortium to pursue its mission through the creation of Web standards, guidelines, and supporting materials.

Proposed / Advance Notice

W3C Community and Business Groups

Marketing & Communications

The W3C Marketing & Communications team handles internal and external communications:

  • Positive communication of who W3C is and what W3C does for the Web overall;
  • Building W3C's influence & improving W3C's reputation;
  • Support of W3C Business Development in recruiting efforts;
  • Support of W3C Working/Interest Groups operations (i.e., Communications execution of the Process Document);
  • Support of W3C Members.

Highlights since the previous report:

Member Relations

The W3C Member Relations function ensures excellent relationships with and participation from our Members. Responsibilities include:

  • Support global Members. Ensure that we are overcoming barriers of time zone, culture, and language;
  • Share W3C information to members;
  • Ensure Member satisfaction and retain existing Members.
  • Listen and learn about Members' business priorities and concerns;
  • Provide input from stakeholders to Strategy Management.

Highlights since the previous report:

  • Local member meetings:
  • W3C group introduction: Contacted individual members who had not yet joined any groups and introduced them to groups based on their interests. This increased the opportunity for members to become more engaged with W3C
  • A help-desk feature will be available on the Member-only page shortly, serving as a W3C kiosk for Members to ask any questions
  • Planning to provide a regular webinar for new Advisory Committee Representatives
  • Developed hand-off-flow and clarified the support W3C can provide for membership continuation
  • 2021 AC Meeting Intro Session: Together with Business Development Team, for new AC Reps to give them an overview of W3C, W3C projects, strategy, and advice from experienced AC Reps
  • Member Testimonials increased after the promotion in February (54/435)

Business Development

The W3C Business Development team is responsible for maximizing the revenue achieved by W3C.

Highlights since the previous report:

Systems

The W3C Systems Team provides and maintains the tools and infrastructure to make the W3C experience easy and the most effective. Its responsibilities include:

  • Maintenance of the W3C Website, Blogs and wikis (co-owned with W3C Marketing & Communications);
  • Data security, servers setup and maintenance, backups;
  • Group services and database, accounts management;
  • Mail and mailing lists setup;
  • Maintenance and migration of in-house tools.

Highlights since the previous report: