For Everyone: Towards a Sustainable Future for Independent Standards Work

• Upcoming
• Tentative
• Breakout Sessions

The bulk of today’s web platform design is done in-house at major browser vendors. This deprives the Web of vital diversity of perspective and naturally favors work with visible short-term impact over the exploratory, bigger picture R&D needed to tackle deeper architectural issues.

For most other web stakeholders, the standards process remains an intimidating black box — so rife with misconceptions and barriers to entry that spending millions on workarounds can seem easier than fixing shortcomings at the source.

And for most other web standards designers, it is a labor of love, disincentivized by employers or as an unpaid side project.
The web platform is one of the most impactful products in the world.
Shaping its evolution requires a rare combination of deep, broad, and interdisciplinary expertise. When the few who can do it well are driven away from it in order to make ends meet, the entire Web loses.

These issues are intertwined. To make independent standards work sustainable, we need to expand the pool of available funding — and the only lasting way to do that is by helping more organizations see web platform design as a path to solving their own problems.

Agenda

Chairs:
Lea Verou, Florian Rivoal, Miriam Suzanne

Description:
The bulk of today’s web platform design is done in-house at major browser vendors. This deprives the Web of vital diversity of perspective and naturally favors work with visible short-term impact over the exploratory, bigger picture R&D needed to tackle deeper architectural issues.

For most other web stakeholders, the standards process remains an intimidating black box — so rife with misconceptions and barriers to entry that spending millions on workarounds can seem easier than fixing shortcomings at the source.

And for most other web standards designers, it is a labor of love, disincentivized by employers or as an unpaid side project.
The web platform is one of the most impactful products in the world.
Shaping its evolution requires a rare combination of deep, broad, and interdisciplinary expertise. When the few who can do it well are driven away from it in order to make ends meet, the entire Web loses.

These issues are intertwined. To make independent standards work sustainable, we need to expand the pool of available funding — and the only lasting way to do that is by helping more organizations see web platform design as a path to solving their own problems.

Goal(s):
This session aims to explore potential structures, governance models, and outreach strategies for a new, independent entity with the mission of addressing both issues. The goal of this new entity is not to compete with any existing organization, but to strengthen the entire ecosystem by increasing awareness and abstracting the complexity of the standards process.

Agenda:
TBD

Materials:

• Session proposal on GitHub

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