Hello everyone, how are you doing?

Can we get more coffee?

All right, okay, I'm going to talk about how we're trying to navigate the future and to keep moving these things towards the web forward.

So no surprise, the web is evolving constantly, that hasn't been, that was the case 30 years ago, it is still happening and in fact it's happening more than ever.

And on top of that now we are changing, impacting even more widely the society and certainly the economic of the web as well is shifting properly.

And so we have to actually deal with those things.

For those of you who haven't been in any AI session or digital wallet session lately, well, you should feel lucky because you're not going to be tired enough by the end of this TPAC.

And from a W3C perspective we need to have a consistent way to be able to navigate those evolutions.

And so this initiative, this task force is really about, so how do we decide what do we do and what we standardize and what we help pushing forward.

And so this task force is not really like, oh, I have a new idea, how I would like W3C to adopt it.

It's really about, like, how can you actually get that to happen.

And so our mission is pretty simple.

By the end of Q1 2026 we need to provide guidance to W3C on how we address, W3C can address the changes and facing the innovation, which innovation we should ignore.

Who knows, if the stock market crashes by next quarter of Q1 we won't have to worry about AI anymore.

And what are the things that issues that people see and that we need to investigate as well.

And keep in mind that not, you know, we take care of some huge part of the web, but IETF, for example, has been taking care of HTTP as well.

So sometimes if you're going to come to me, I'm going, might say, oh, this sounds like an HTTP problem, not mine.

Go and talk to them instead.

So this is not the only one to contribute to the web.

So I went to the TAG and I said, I need your help because the TAG is supposed to take care of our technical architecture and is also in the equation about what do we do and when do we do it as well.

So I've got a few of them to agree to participate.

And I also got Dan Appelquist, who happened to be at the wrong time in July.

And you willingly accepted to be also as, even though he's now a co-chair of the AB, he accepted to come and help on that one as well.

So I certainly invite you to talk to any of the people listed on these slides about what you think we should do.

One of the things that we need to talk about is like, so how do we decide those things?

And part of this is having a list of criteria for the new technology that we are facing on that.

First, is it within our scope?

As I just mentioned earlier, there are things that are in the scope of HTTP that we do not have to actually address here, necessarily.

How much of a global impact do you expect to have with your idea?

If you're only going to affect a certain country and it will be no use outside of your country, it's a lot less likely that we are going to be interested to look at it unless we see a pathway.

Yes, it could become important at the global level as well.

How much community involvement you have is an important factor.

If this is only your idea and no one else wants to actually work on your ideas, then it will only remain your idea.

How much it is aligned with our vision and principles?

We, two years ago, when I did the technical strategy breakout session, one of the questions I was asked was like, how are you going to make decisions on what to move forward or not?

And unfortunately, it was someone from the TAG who asked me that question and I transformed that already into I need principles from the TAG.

And the good news is we've got two of them in the past 12 months, the ethical web principle and the privacy principle.

So we should actually thank you.

So that's what we can use to actually make decisions to decide whether something goes for the web or not.

And I expect that sometimes there will be conflicting requirements.

We've been seeing a lot of that in our example review already, so we should expect that to happen as well.

There is not a black, this is never a black and white answer as well.

One of the considerations is also our ability to make changes to the ideas being proposed.

If you have an idea and you're not willing to come to actually adapt and change your ideas, and I'm like, well, if it will remain your idea, you have to be willing to work with the community as a whole, get feedback from the community, and evolve your idea, and change your idea, even if you have a normally deployed product.

And also, what are the risks involved in actually working on the idea?

I mean, are we impacting society?

The tag, last week, published a first draft on the societal impact consideration.

And that's going to be, I expect, this document over time is going to be part of helping us to make decision on whether we should work on something or not.

As well, I'm sure that some people would like us not to work on AI, while other people, they'd like to completely pack a room and overcrowded it when they would put AI on the topic.

Having said that, we do have some current mechanism to address that.

I mean, we've been following a strategy for a few more than 10 years now, but we want people to come with their ideas and be able to create a community around their idea and let it foster as well.

So we favor early exploration.

We don't exclude any idea.

In general, if you come to me, there is a good sense I'm going to say, oh, how about you go into a community group with your idea?

And let's see how much it sticks to it.

Yesterday, I've got the idea that we need to make QR code a first class citizen of the web.

And I'm trying to actually motivate the community to go and put that into the web incubator community group.

So community groups has been a major pillar of us being able to allow the community to have conversations about early ideas.

A good sense of ideas are being brought into the W3C working group, but some of them actually went to the, some of them went to ECMA and to what we do as well.

Another way we have is workshops.

This year, we organized two workshops, one which was remotely the authentic web.

Last month, there was one on age-based restriction access.

Which I would like to say they resolved everything, but it's going to take more time to resolve that one.

As well, we have another one coming up in late February on the smart voice agents.

And yes, there is a link between smart voice agents and AI, as you can guess.

And we have Interest Groups.

We've been creating Interest Groups for quite a long time.

We have one on media and entertainment, which has been pretty active.

The one on my payment security has been pretty active as well.

There is a proposal to create a web and AI interest group.

And we have the strategy pipeline, a GitHub repository, where we help track to that.

What you do not see at the bottom of the slide, because I did not realize it, is on Friday at 2 p.m., the Exploration IG is meeting, which is meant to, hey, I have a new idea and we need to guide, we need, we'd like to know some, have to know what to do with that.

So Friday at 2 p.m., Exploration IG goes there.

And Francois already talked about charter refinement, so, which is new in the process.

But if you click on those links, by the way, even if you're not part of, whether you are part of a working group or community group and stuff like that, you will find the answer, like, how to help navigate those things.

So certainly we need your input on this.

What would you expect to see in the technology strategy report?

For sure, what technology are we missing?

But more importantly, why are we missing it?

That would be very interesting for us to know.

How do we evaluate new technologies?

We like your input as well.

If we are lacking some principles, which principles are we making, that we should be using to evaluate?

How do we prioritize and how do we measure success as well?

And to finish, so, talk to us during TPAC.

We're doing a breakout tomorrow at 5 p.m. on navigating the future.

It was added earlier today, so if you didn't haven't signed up to it before, that's why.

And this is our timeline.

I'm hoping we can get a draft report in front of the community, so that we can get feedback and integrate that, so that we can finalize that by the end of March.

Thank you.