Form for W3C Advisory Committee to vote (W3C Member-only) | Advisory Board public page
This page lists publicly nominations and statements for the 2023 election to W3C Advisory Board (AB). Each person has been nominated by at least one W3C Member according to the AB election process.
The W3C Membership elects the members of the Advisory Board. For this election W3C will fill six seats.
Timeline:
Note: The deadline for votes is 03:59 UTC, 2 June 2023 (23:59 Boston Time, 1 June 2023).
The following nominations have been made (listed in alphabetical order by nominee family name):
An asterisk (*) indicates that the nominee is a current participant. All individuals were nominated by the AC Representatives of their organizations unless otherwise indicated below.
The following nomination statements have been made (listed in alphabetical order by nominee family name):
I am pleased to be able to nominate Tantek Çelik for the Advisory Board.
I have known Tantek for a couple of decades, since his work on the Tasman rendering engine, and I have always appreciated the perspective he brings to standards development and his continuous advocacy on behalf of users. Tantek has consistently championed the Advisory Board using open communication and adopting a culture of working in the open. He has also grown community interest in sustainability at the W3C, as well as continuing to be an advocate for privacy and security in the web platform.
Tantek would provide valuable insight in at least two of the major priorities on the Advisory Board's plate - developing the Principles and Vision further, and developing a roadmap for incubation. I am pleased to recommend Tantek as a candidate.
Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help continue transitioning W3C to a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 25 years.
I am Mozilla’s Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have previously served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013. In the early years I advanced the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers.
At the same time I co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group that produced several widely interoperably deployed Social Web Standards, most notably the ActivityPub specification, which has received renewed attention as the technology behind Mastodon and other social web implementations.
In my most recent AB terms I led the AB’s Priority Project for an updated W3C Vision, drove consensus in issues & meetings, and submitted & reviewed pull requests to advance our Vision draft.
Environmental sustainability is a global concern, and the impacts of technologies, services, and standards are important for W3C to consider in all of its work, as the TAG has summarized in the W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles. To raise the importance of sustainability (s12y) at W3C, last year I established the W3C Sustainability Community Group, and subsequently organized interested participants at TPAC 2022 into asynchronous work areas, such as working on Sustainability Horizontal Reviews.
The next two years of the Advisory Board are a critical transition period, and will require experienced & active AB members to work in coordination with the TAG and the Board of Directors to establish new models and procedures for sustainable community-driven leadership and governance of W3C.
I believe governance of W3C, and advising thereof, is most effectively done by those who have the experience of actively working in W3C working groups on specifications, and especially those who directly use & create on the web using W3C standards. This direct connection to the actual work of the web and W3C is essential to prioritizing the purpose & scope of governance thereof.
I post on my personal site tantek.com. You may follow my posts there or from Mastodon: @tantek.com@tantek.com.
I have Mozilla’s financial support to spend my time pursuing these goals, and ask for your support to build the broad consensus required to achieve them.
If you have any questions or want to chat about the W3C Advisory Board, Values & Vision, or anything else W3C related, please reach out by email: tantek at mozilla.com. Thank you for your consideration. This statement is also published publicly on my blog.
Samsung is pleased to nominate Heejin Chung to the AB election. Heejin has been a member of AB during the very confusing but important period time of W3C, and I believe she did great job as a member of AB, and also Advisory Board liaisons of Board of Directors.
I am Heejin Chung, lead of the Samsung Internet team. My first term on the AB was quite difficult, with more time commitment necessary than expected, but seeing the Legal Entity transition finally happen was definitely fulfilling.
Although W3C Inc. is up and running, there are still many things that needed to be sorted out in order to stabilize the organization. While the Board of Directors are tackling these issues, we should continue improving transparency and communication across W3C.
As (experimental) AB liaison I hope to help in conveying the membership's views and opinions to the board when necessary, and settling guidelines and expectation for communication between governing bodies.
With the AB's focus back on the usual priorities, I would like to contribute more in the following areas if given the chance to continue on the AB.
If you have any questions, please contact me at heejin.r.chung@samsung.com. Thank you.
I'm thrilled to nominate Elika J Etemad for re-election to the Advisory Board.
Elika is a long-time participant in the CSS and Internationalization Working Groups, and has co-edited dozens of W3C specifications including CSS2, CSS Grid Layout, CSS Writing Modes, and CSS Paged Media. She is intimately familiar with W3C's processes and culture, having been embedded in it daily for the last two decades; and is widely known for her ability to manage details, to communicate clearly, and to generally create order out of chaos. Elika believes that W3C's collaborative, public, consensus-based, and royalty-free standardization process brings out the best in Web technology, and is dedicated to the success of W3C as a home and a framework for developing the Web platform.
Elika previously served a full term on the AB from 2019-2021, during which she was a crucial leader in:
Since stepping down from the AB she's remained engaged by co-chairing the Process CG (where she also co-edits the Process with Florian Rivoal), by sending occasional informal status reports to the AC to keep them informed, and by stepping in as scribe and secretary when needed.
She currently serves on the AB, having been elected to a 6-month term during which she is working on:
She is now running again for a new, full term on the AB to continue this work.
Elika started her career in Web standards in 1999, doing spec conformance QA for the Mozilla open source project as a curious contributor before being invited to join the CSSWG 2004 as a volunteer spec editor. This experience instilled a lifelong commitment to bug reporting and open collaboration, and to the value of seriously addressing feedback by integrating it into a solid, precisely-specified, and coherent proposal. She holds an engineering degree from Princeton University, and has spent most of her life in either the SF Bay or NYC Metro areas; she's also spent short periods living in Norway (to work for Opera), China (to study Chinese), and Japan (to work on CSS Writing Modes), and is also conversant in French and Farsi. Corporate sponsors of her work over the years include Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, Google, Bloomberg, Hewlett-Packard, Antenna House, EAST Japan, Brave, and Bocoup.
It is a great pleasure to nominate Max Gendler for the Advisory Board (AB) and to invite you to vote for him in this election.
As you know, the web is facing hard problems and the W3C is at a turning point. I believe that our problems are solvable and that we can turn the W3C around. We can make W3C the organisation that brings solutions to the web’s problems to life. But for that to happen we need new perspectives, new voices, and new leaders who understand how to listen, how to build consensus, and how to develop a vision.
I’ve had many occasions to see Max at work. He is thoughtful in every interaction and understands how both technology and policy work. I have seen him creating consensus between industry competitors around hard choices and getting technologists, lawyers, marketers, CEOs, and policymakers to work together. He is equally at ease nerding out on data analysis with fellow geeks and explaining complex topics to high-ranking lawmakers.
Max has a deep understanding of privacy and of people-centric advertising. He has become an important voice in the wide alliance of those who want the web to stay open, and he can represent the perspective of those who use the web and publish content on it. This is particularly important when the emergence of LLMs is threatening the incentive to make content available to all. I know that Max would make an excellent member to the W3C Advisory Board, bringing a fresh and wise perspective at a time when we sorely need it.
Thank you for taking the time to consider Max, I know that you won’t regret electing him.
Dear colleagues,
For those of you who I haven’t yet had the pleasure to meet, my name is Max Gendler, and I am the Head of Consumer Data Governance at News Corp. I started working on W3C matters back when I was part of The New York Times’s Governance team, and I have constantly focused on two things: making sure that no one should have to sacrifice privacy to support publishers and pushing for people who build things on the web to have an actual say in how the web runs.
Improving privacy and putting the web in the hands of those who build on it are topics that the W3C is well positioned to excel at, which is why I advocated strongly for us to join the W3C. In order to achieve these goals, I believe that the W3C could benefit from improving its governance so as to be more representative of the web. That is why I am running for the AB.
With technological offices in cities like Bangalore, Sydney, Barcelona, and Princeton, News Corp has a global perspective on the issues facing the modern web, and particularly newspaper and book publishers. Newer technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), are worsening the concentration of internet power and control. We have to develop the collective governance that the web needs in order to stay open.
The transitions to a new legal entity and a community-led process represent an important moment for W3C and our community. I would be honored to serve on the Advisory Board, and will continue to advocate for a process that supports a greater focus on people thanks to standards on topics such as trust, accessibility, and privacy.
Wendy represents all that is good about the W3C community. If I were to join the W3C today, Wendy would strike me as someone whose example I should follow, but having had the good fortune to collaborate with Wendy on a number of different W3C activities over the years, I can actually say that she is exactly the kind of person the AB needs right now.
Wendy is a huge advocate for an accessible and inclusive web, subjects close to my heart of course. Her involvement with the Positive Working Environment CG is a reflection of Wendy's belief that respect and consideration must be the cornerstones of our community, characteristics that Wendy herself has in abundance.
Wendy is an active member of the publishing activity at W3C, contributing to an array of technical specifications that utilise core web technologies (like HTML and ARIA) to enable content creators to publish interoperable and accessible eBooks.
Having spent six years on the AB myself, I know how much time and effort it takes to participate effectively, and that too often candidates do not seem to recognise that simply turning up to meetings is not enough. I have absolutely no doubt that Wendy has the right attitude, knowledge, time, and ability to be a cheerful, hard-working, and valued member of the AB - which is why TetraLogical has nominated Wendy and why I encourage all of you to choose her first when the time comes to vote.
Hi, I am Wendy Reid and I am running for the W3C Advisory Board. I am running because I believe in the future of the W3C, especially its role in maintaining an open, inclusive, and interoperable web. I am running because to achieve that future, the AB needs new perspectives, voices, and people eager to see the vision through to completion.
At Rakuten Kobo, I am the Accessibility and Publishing Standards Lead, where I focus on ensuring our products and experiences are accessible to all readers, and that we follow standards where we can. I see the impact standards and accessibility have on users every single day, good or bad, and I want to bring that experience and insight to the AB.
I have been part of the W3C since 2017, a relative newcomer in comparison to many of you. Since joining, I have taken on the roles of Chair for the Publishing, Audiobooks, and EPUB 3 Working groups, Chair of the Positive Work Environments Community Group, and editor of the Audiobooks specification. In any group I join I ensure I am an active and contributing participant in whatever way is needed. I have had the honour of working with and learning from some of the best people in this organization, an experience I am incredibly grateful for.
W3C is facing a pivotal moment in its development as an organization, one that presents incredible challenges and opportunities. The web is more essential to our lives than ever, and W3C needs to be an organization that reflects that importance while also ensuring we do what we must to protect the end user. This means creating a vision that reflects our values: trust, privacy, accessibility, inclusion, sustainability, and equity. The current AB managed us through a crisis, but it is now time to create something new; for that we need people who are ready to collaborate, listen, and build. The AB needs new voices and perspectives as the W3C enters the next phase of its development, and I believe I can bring that fresh perspective.
For those that do not know me, I believe strongly in collaboration, inclusion, and listening. We need more perspectives in W3C, particularly from underrepresented communities and industries. I also believe we need to do more to make standards work and the documents we produce accessible and understandable to the broader community. I work very hard to do this within my own working groups, through documentation, discussion, and listening. We need to apply this openness to everything we do, from process to recommendations.
On a personal note, I would be honoured to serve on the Advisory Board of an organization I have admired for a long time. Long before joining and starting my career in technology, I was a kid with an endless curiosity for how the web worked. It’s through the web I met lifelong friends, learned an infinite number of things, and saw how connecting people could be both amazing and terrifying. I believe in the power of the web to do amazing things, but we also need to acknowledge the dangers of a web without constraints or protections. This is where I believe the W3C makes an impact and can continue to do so.
Thank you for your consideration. If you would like to get to know me better, please reach out at wendy.reid@rakuten.com.
The statement is also available in 日本語, 中文, Español, Français.
Fondazione LIA is pleased to nominate Avneesh Singh to the advisory board. I have worked alongside Avneesh for more than a decade. He is a highly competent mission-driven leader, with extensive experience in developing accessibility standards and managing a global non-profit consortium serving people with disabilities. His great ability to understand diverse perspectives and work collaboratively to solve complex situations is a huge asset. He is well known for his strategic insights and bringing the worldwide perspective. I am confident that Avneesh will be instrumental in the AB's work on transforming W3C into a community driven organization, increasing focus on social values and, establishing fair and trustworthy decision making systems for replacing the functions of the Director.
A strategic leader with a drive for leading a life of purpose.
I am Chief Operating Officer at the DAISY Consortium, the global organization which pioneered worldwide standards for accessible digital books and a longtime W3C member, highly active in W3C accessibility standards and publishing groups.
Thank you for electing me to the Advisory Board (AB) for the last four years. It has been a journey full of strategic development, analysis, and learning. When joining the AB, my experience in managing a non-profit consortium helped me discover the crucial strategic issues which are likely to disrupt us in the future. Therefore, I initiated the work on organizational strategy (purpose, vision, values, principles, and strategic goals) using a three-way open collaboration between the AB, the W3C team, and the greater W3C community. Over the last two years I have worked towards ensuring that the W3C vision includes the views of the worldwide community and is expressed in a way which is easily understandable by all.
I also contributed to bringing diversity, inclusion, global participation and balancing the business interests to the legal entity’s Board model. I was among the strong voices advocating for a collaborative approach including W3C Steering Committee, W3M, AB and views from the community for all important decisions for transitioning to the new legal entity.
I am based in Delhi, India, in the emerging Asian economy which will add more than 1 billion internet users in the next decade. My participation in the Bureau of Indian Standards and grassroots initiatives in developing countries have helped me to understand the needs of underserved communities and the potential that the world wide web holds for transforming lives.
I am a computer engineer with extensive experience in developing international standards and software implementations. I earned an Executive MBA in Strategy and Marketing from the Indian Institute of Management and further expanded analytical and strategic skills at Harvard University, studying approaches for mobilizing non-profit Boards and optimizing governance. At W3C I chair accessibility task forces in EPUB 3 WG and Publishing CG, and participate in WAI developments.
I have gained vast relevant experience in non-profit governance and international strategy development while working with the Board of the DAISY Consortium, a community-based non-profit with members and partners in more than 100 countries. My 17 years of experience of developing accessibility standards and implementations with multicultural and multilingual participants has well sensitized me for the needs of the non-English speaking communities.
Recently W3C became an independent legal entity. We need to continue our dedicated work to ensure a smooth transition and achieve stability, while evolving the organization to reinforce its worldwide leadership. The AB has an especially vital role in the new W3C: to transform W3C into a community driven organization, make various parts of W3C work together and to ensure that fair and trustworthy decision making systems are established for replacing the “W3C Director”.
Based on insights that I gained over the last four years; I will be instrumental in:
I have relevant experience, and I have a listening and reflective personality. This offers the ideal balance of the required skills, with the ability to comprehend and synthesize diverse views.
We are at a crucial point in the W3C, with Tim stepping down, transition to a new legal entity and transformation of W3C into a community driven global organization. Well-considered strategic decisions will transform this crucial point into a historical, positive inflection point for the W3C. I am looking forward to representing you in the AB.
Please do not hesitate to contact me at avneesh.sg@gmail.com or asingh@daisy.org .
Wiley is pleased to nominate Chris Wilson to the AB. Chris has poured his whole into working for the W3C. He has years of technical experience as well as an understanding of the needs of the W3C of the present and future. Chris put an enormous amount of time and effort toward positioning the W3C so that the Legal Entity could succeed. He will work hard to continue efforts to build a better W3C community that is more successful at working together.
Now more than ever, the W3C needs contributors who will listen to each other, build consensus, and do the work to build a more principled future together.
I have been involved with the W3C community since its inception. I was a founding member of the CSS Working Group and have chaired and participated in many Working Groups and other efforts. My 30-year long career in the Web spans engineering the early NCSA Mosaic browser for Windows through a 15-year career at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer, to my current role as Web Standards Tech Lead on the Google Chrome team. I currently co-chair the Immersive Web Working Group and the Immersive Web and Web Platform Incubation Community Groups, and I am Google’s Advisory Committee representative.
I have served on the Advisory Board for several terms, I and co-chaired the AB with Tzviya Siegman for the past couple of years. My chairing partnership with Tzviya has been one of the best parts of my work on the AB, as we have worked together to broaden the AB’s outlook and improve its efficiency. I have led aspects of the efforts to transition the W3C to a single legal entity, working to build consensus and set the organization up for success. I have also served as the lead editor of the Vision document - though definitely not the “author”, nor the sole or even primary contributor. I believe passionately that the W3C must establish clear shared values and principles to function as a guiding conscience for the work we do on the web.
Finally, I care deeply about improving the W3C and the Advisory Board itself. With my AB colleagues, and especially in close partnership with Tzviya, I have personally driven improving how we structure and lead meetings and work to make the AB more productive. As someone who possesses much privilege, I am conscious of the responsibility I have to explicitly champion inclusion to support diversity. I actively try to set norms of interaction to enable equity in engagement - to make those of all backgrounds feel welcomed and encouraged to participate in our shared discussions, and ensure that small voices can be heard as loudly and clearly as large ones can, while also trying to balance a common goal for all users of the web platform, not just special interests.
In short, what is needed most on the AB is people who will show up, listen to each other, and put in the effort to complete work. I am offering my energy and effort to help continue the AB’s, and the W3C’s success. Thank you for your support, and please contact me if you have any further questions (cwilso@google.com).
Song XU - China Mobile, is leading the technical architecture department in web-based solutions covering AI, cloud computing, UHD audiovisual production in media and gaming sections. As the technical director, he managed the Web and mobile platform for FIFA World Cup/Olympics Games with peak traffic by 200M access per day, and clouding gaming platform by 110M MAU. As the Rights Holding Broadcaster, we deployed the web-based production and distribution platform working with hundreds of media studios.
Song XU is actively engaged in 3GPP、EBU/DVB, ITU standardization and regulation bodies. He s co-chairing WNIG and participating MEIG, Realtime CG of W3C, other regional standardization and regulation bodies. He's one of the famous and active leaders in WebRTC/Web3/IoT/WebXR/Metaverse developer communities in some regions, serving the web vendors, content providers and technology developers with the operator/coordinator role.