TPAC2015 and IETF94

We held TPAC 2015, our annual organization-wide meeting, on 26-30 October 2015 in Sapporo, Japan.

We registered a record attendance of 580 participants throughout the week, breaking last year’s record participation of 550. 43 work groups met face-to-face, participants organized 50 breakout sessions on security, web payments, web of things, web-based signage, HTML, Testing, CSS, video, digital publishing, etc. “Everyone is using the technologies, and driving new requirements,” said Jun Murai on stage. In a lively discussion on stage, Tim Berners-Lee talked about the new activities we are taking on such as Web Payments and Web of Things. There was a lot of energy in the meetings at TPAC.

I presented the W3C Industry Vertical Champion Program, aimed at understanding the needs of the industries our Members are in and with appointed internal champions, address business problems within the core of the Web in sectors such as Automotive, Digital Marketing, Digital Publishing, Entertainment, Telecommunications and Web Payments.

We announced Web Developers avenue, one-stop page featuring the tools and resources W3C has for Web developers to learn, build, get involved, move the Web forward. A question from the floor during TPAC 2013 in Shenzhen was about W3C giving a greater voice to Web developers. We focused on which of our services the Web developers value in particular, give them a greater voice and increase their affiliation: our free validators and tools, to build Web content that works now and will work in the future; W3C Community Groups to propose and incubate new work, that more than six thousand people have embraced since 2011; our free and premium Training programs, to learn from the creators of the Web technologies; and Discourse, to share ideas and feedback with the community on Web Standards. We also introduced a gratitude program, Friends. We are making it easy to affiliate as Friends, take advantage of our offerings, and we encourage to donate to support us in conducting the activities that fulfill the W3C’s mission.

W3C and NTT Communications jointly organized a W3C Developer meet-up. More than 300 attended that successful event which we built around industry demos and talks on substantial subjects by Natasha Rooney, Lea Verou, Jake Archibald, Hyojin Song, Noriatsu Kudo, Stefan Thomas, Evan Schwartz and Adrian Hope Bailie.

One topic stood out during the week: Web security. At least twenty unconference breakout sessions were related to or touched on security, as well as three presentations at the W3C Advisory Committee Meeting, including a comprehensive report and new work in Web Application Security by Brad Hill of Facebook. During the Technical Plenary (minutes) I moderated a panel on the future of the Internet and the Web. I invited on stage Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW and Director of the W3C, Vint Cerf, father of the Internet, and Jun Murai, father of Japan's Internet, who shared historical anecdotes and considerations on security – which has to be in everything, as Tim stressed – on cryptography, strong authentication and trust. Vint calls W3C and IETF enablers. We took an action to foster high-level discussions between the two on what is missing from the enabling protocol space to make strong authentication, high integrity, and other trust building mechanisms on the platform.

We “co-located” TPAC with IETF who held a meeting in Yokohama the following week, that I attended with a few of my colleagues. I was pleased to host some senior people of the IETF at TPAC; Vint Cerf, as you’ve just read; Jari Arkko, IETF Chair; Andrew Sullivan, IAB chair; and a number of participants attending sessions at both meetings, including many in WebRTC-rtcweb groups, where I hear the interaction was conducive to good progress. During the IETF plenary session, one question from the floor was about the co-location and whether it was going to be done again. I went to the microphone and confirmed the co-location was deliberate as we want to be next to them in time and space as often as possible.

Lastly, as part of preparation for TPAC, we published for the Membership “W3C Highlights – October 2015,” now public, which I invite you to read.

We have already begun discussions of TPAC next year, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal on 19-23 September 2016, and I am looking forward to seeing you there.