W3C Highlights and Advisory Committee meeting
Author(s) and publish date
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Jeff Jaffe
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W3C had its annual meeting last week in Boston and it was one of the most interactive meetings we have had in recent memory. During the meeting we released the W3C highlights for Spring 2016, a comprehensive report of W3C's vision and focus; and had informative discussions from industry presenters and keynote speakers.
We also had an opportunity to discuss a proposal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about a covenant related to our Encrypted Media Extensions specification; see the information on EME work at W3C we recently made available.
Participants were most energized by a discussion about what is the Next Big Thing for the Web. Everyone seemed to think there was so much more work to do in moving the Web forward. In a straw poll, the leading topics were Web Security, Web Payments, Web of Things, and (of course) the core platform. These definitely map to where we are seeing the most excitement in W3C groups. More details can be found in our recent security blog posts; my recent payments blog post; my recent WoT post; and the Web Platform Working Group's co-chairs next steps for the core platform blog post.
Other Highlights of the meeting:
- We spent half a day looking at how the Web leads industry to its full potential and vice versa. The speakers - principally from industry - taught us a great deal about how Web technologies impact their industries. See our efforts in Telecommunications, Web Payments, Web of Things, Digital Publishing, Automotive and Entertainment.
- We had about 10 BOF sessions over lunch as Advisory Committee representatives and the Team thought through diverse topics such as Digital Marketing, executive focus on Web technologies, and blockchain.
- We spent an afternoon getting an update on technical topics and tooling. A highlight was Nigel Megitt's professionally delivered video speech as we all celebrated getting our first Emmy. Several attendees were seen getting their pictures taken with the Emmy.
- Bruce Schneier delivered an impressive keynote about the growing impact of what he called "the World-Sized Web" as the Internet of Things brings more parts of world infrastructure within the domain of Web technology. A particular focus was on how to secure this infrastructure.
Is it possible to see the speech of Mr. Megitt somewhere online? I am very interested in it.
Stefan, That speech unfortunately has some internal information. But if you want to see Philippe Le Hegaret's acceptance speech it can be found at: https://www.w3.org/2016/01/Emmy/
I think Stefan's pretty reasonable request sums up things from my perspective, there's some obviously fantastic work being done ... but the intellectuals aren't connecting with the person on the ground responsible for doing the actual work. I've heard multiple stories of people reaching out to W3C but there's really not much support and that that's on offer is a bit wishy washy or no existent. It's left to strong leaders in the field to pick up the slack, the whole field is awash with stories of people who have ran out of energy. As a person working on website I want back up to implement the standards because without it we're all just lost in a world of supervisory opinion and forced direction. Maybe you can all discuss that 'intellectually' at one of your next presentations, not that any of us will be able to watch it because it might contain some internal information. Who do you lot think you are? The CIA? I've got to be pretty bloody desperate for entertainment to watch Philippe Le Hegaret’s acceptance speech. Don't bother replying, I'm really not interested in a university tutorial type discussion where the end result is you lot demonstrate how clever you and not actually do anything to assist us common working class types.
I'm interested in the speech of Mr. Megitt