W3C Strategic Highlights for Spring 2017 and Advisory Committee Meeting

W3C held its annual meeting late April in Beijing. The theme of the meeting was "Vision for W3C". During the meeting we released the W3C Strategic Highlights for Spring 2017, a comprehensive report of W3C's vision and focus; had informative discussions from industry presenters and keynote speakers, heard about priorities of the W3C Advisory Board and the Technical Architecture Group.

My W3C Vision presentation revolved around addressing the everyday needs of Web users, advances in technology requiring the Web, industry impact and needs, and finally impact on society; and we built the entire meeting agenda to dive into the next level of detail in selected topics, presenting the four areas of excellence of W3C's vision:

• Strengthening of the core of the Web
  • Security
  • Web Performance
  • Enhancement of HTML, DOM

• Exciting with the next level experience
  • WebVR, Augmented Reality
  • CSS
  • Accessibility
  • WebRTC

• Meeting industry needs
  • Support 5G
  • Publishing
  • Web Payments
  • Entertainment

• Extending the reach of the Web
  • Automotive
  • Web of Things

At the end of the second day, we held a vision workshop where attendees broke out into smaller groups for focused discussion, then shared reports with the full Advisory Committee. Participants called on the W3C Community to take big stands and to focus on core competencies; to look at the non-browser Web; to look at constituencies including users, developers, and industries; and to develop roadmaps showing the Web's dependencies and sequence for adding enhancements. Some groups also noted specific technical areas they wanted to see highlighted or de-emphasized. The Strategy Team is taking this input, along with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), and working to build a 3-5 year strategic plan to share with the membership and community, to help in prioritizing the work we develop through the Strategy Funnel.