Good evening, I'm Chris Wilson and I want to welcome all of you here
to the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the W3C.
So, I want to be clear that is all of us here in the room but also all of those of you
joining us remotely on the web as well. Now, before we get started, I do
want to remind everyone that, in our community, we abide by a code of
conduct and we want every participant to feel appreciated and respected,
and that means adhering to high levels of personal behavior.
So, if at any time, you have any concerns please find a staff member that can help point
you in the right direction.
But, for those of you who don't know me very well.
I have been involved with the web platform actually since before W3C was created.
I co‑wrote the Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, so that second
milestone that was highlighted in the video, the first one that involved
anyone other than Tim Berners-Lee, I was involved in that.
So, this picture of me is from the very first web conference ever, it was the web wizard's
workshop, hosted by O'Reilly Media in 1993. Now, when I started working on the web, I was at the very
early web, I should be clear, I was really compelled by this idea that
the web was for everyone.
That every day, average people like me, not just tech gods or large
publishers or things like that, could actually produce and share content.
And in 1997, I wrote a very basic webpage, complete with ASCII art,
about how to make didgeridoos, they're Australian aboriginal wind instruments for those you don't know.
But, I wrote a page about how to make them out of raw bamboo and I'd put put it up on GeoCities.
Really, there's got to be more love than that for GeoCities. Thank you.
It's like if you say Myspace, there's supposed to be a reaction too.
But, I put my email address in the page, better yet my Microsoft email address at the time.
And for more than a decade afterwards, about once a month, I would get an e‑mail for somebody asking for help
on how to build didgeridoos or 'hey, where do you source raw bamboo in Finland'
which turns out I was not an expert on.
But the idea that average people like me could add to the human knowledge base,
could contribute to the collective soul, was super compelling to me then and it is why I am still compelled to
work on this today. But, of course, clearly our world has snowballed.
It's radically grown from there both in power and in problems. And my
anecdote of teaching people to build didgeridoos on a webpage is really point in a
world where you can find YouTube videos on any topic imaginable. You can
find articles on it and social media has become probably our biggest
interpersonal interaction mechanism.
Now, our infrastructure of knowledge, of communication, of connection,
is really straining at a lot of these seams, and there's no lack of
challenges for us to overcome. And I'm sure in this new era, you're all
just as compelled as I am personally to address these infrastructural
problems to empower users to make the web work for everyone.
And, that's really why we are all here, that's why we all show up at the W3C.
So, tonight, as we celebrate what we've accomplished with the web in the last 30 years,
we should also recognize what work lies ahead for us. Thanks.