Staff

The W3C Team is composed of 52 people of mixed gender, age and race who come from 14 different regions across the globe. With a truly international flavor, the W3C Team operates primarily remotely and includes engineers and experts who work from more than 10 different countries.

Read more about the W3C's functional internal organization.

See group photos we took over the years.

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Atsushi Shimono

Principal, Team Contact

Atsushi joined the W3C team in November 2018. Currently in the Projects team, and staff for internationalization, Immersive-Web WG, and Timed-Text WG.
Atsushi holds a PhD in Science, with a research area in Astrophysics (observations of Active Galactic Nucleus) from Kyoto University in Japan.

Tzviya Siegman

Director, Sustainability; Director, North America (NA) Member Relations

Tzviya joined W3C in September 2024 as Sustainability Lead and is responsible for North American Member Relations. Prior to joining the Team, Tzviya worked as Standards Principal at Wiley. She became a group participant in 2013 in many of the Publishing groups at W3C, where she led, coordinated, and contributed to several initiatives to develop common standards and best practices.

Tzviya also joined the Positive Work Environment group, which she now chairs, and helped rewrite W3C’s Code of Conduct. Tzviya was elected to the W3C Advisory Board for 3 consecutive terms between 2018 and 2024. She was elected Chair of that group during all of her terms. Tzviya enjoys working on sustainability because it is an essential area for W3C to explore, ensuring that our impact on the physical world is positive and prioritizes the planet and people.

Tzviya received a BA in English Literature from Yeshiva University, speaks Hebrew, and is interested in her kids and pottery and reading in her spare time.

Michael[tm] Smith (sideshowbarker)

Principal, Web Applications

Projects team. Browser-engine hacker. Opera alumnus. Joined the W3C in 2007. Tokyo.

Ralph Swick

Chief Operating Officer

Ralph joined W3C in January 1997, to focus on the Privacy and Demographics project. As that project (now called P3P) was starting, Ralph also started the Metadata project. The Resource Description Framework became a full-time responsibility when the Metadata Activity turned into the Semantic Web Activity. In 2007 Ralph became the leader of the Technology and Society Domain and in 2009 was appointed Acting Chief Operating Officer. As of 2010 the 'acting' qualifier was removed. Then in 2022 Ralph was appointed as Interim Chief Executive Officer of the new W3C, Inc. In November 2023 when W3C's permanent CEO joined, Ralph resumed his role as Chief Operating Officer.

Ralph came to W3C from the X Consortium, where he was Technical Director for the X Window System. Ralph brings to W3C both a systems background and an application background. Long involved with the X Window System, Ralph was one of the architects of the Xt Intrinsics (user interface) toolkit.

Prior to joining the X Consortium, Ralph was a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Office Systems Advanced Development Group. There he worked on information filtering tools (software agents) and computer-supported cooperative work tools. Before that, Ralph was in Digital's Corporate Research Group working at MIT Project Athena. Ralph holds a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Ralph's interests are in applications of Web technologies to support human-human interaction, especially over time and distance.