Legal

Consortium legal resources and policies.

Christine Gefaell

Role: Director of Legal & Compliance

Christine joined the W3C Team in October 2024 as Director of Legal and Compliance to ensure W3C operates in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations throughout the world, to advise on all legal matters, to guide the organization's policies, ultimately furthering our mission and goals.

Prior to joining W3C, Christine worked as an associate general counsel in the ethics and compliance department at a global, biotech company focusing on areas such as antitrust, trade compliance, anti-bribery/anti-corruption, human rights, and risk management, generally. Previous to this corporate position, she worked in litigation as a defense, professional malpractice attorney. Christine is licensed in both New Jersey and Connecticut.

See her LinkedIn profile for more information.

Ralph Swick

Role: 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.

Rigo Wenning

Role: Rechtsanwalt

Rigo Wenning joined W3C in 1999 with a focus on privacy and digital signatures. He currently works as member of the legal team, is team contact for the Patents & Standards Interest Group and works on Linked data projects.

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