Hiroshi Ota

Nomination Statement

Link: https://www.w3.org/2025/04/ab-nominations.html

Hiroshi Ota is nominated by The News Corporation.

Nomination statement from the Advisory Committee Representative from The News Corporation:

It is my great pleasure to nominate Hiroshi Ota for the Advisory Board (AB) and to invite you to vote for him in this election.

We need new perspectives, new voices, and new leaders who understand how to listen and turn what they hear into a vision for a better Web.

I've had many occasions to see Hiroshi Ota at work. He is thoughtful in every interaction and has done a wonderful job as both an AC rep and as one of the W3C Japan Ambassadors over the past few years. I believe the lessons he has learned from bridging the gap between the Japanese community and Global communities in W3C can be of great help to the AB moving forward.

I know that Ota-san would make an excellent addition to the W3C Advisory Board, bringing a fresh and wise perspective to our work.

Thank you for your consideration, I know that you won't regret electing him.

Nomination statement from Hiroshi Ota:

I am Hiroshi Ota from LY Corporation (former Yahoo!JAPAN). I have served as the AC Rep for Yahoo!JAPAN since it became a W3C member in 2018, and I continue to serve in this role at LY Corporation following the company's merger. As one of the W3C Japan Ambassadors, I have been working to bridge the Japanese local community and the global W3C community, aiming to strengthen global contributions from local communities.

Currently, I lead standardization and open source initiatives at LY Corporation. Throughout my career, I have led projects and organizations across diverse fields including product management, research and development, business development, strategic planning, sales, organizational design, and education. In addition, I have promoted educational outreach activities to public schools and local government officials, conveying the significance of technical standards and consensus building.

Drawing on my experience in leading diverse projects and facilitating consensus across different organizations and values, I am running for the Advisory Board to contribute to the future of W3C and web users.

Motivation and Awareness of Issues

Through my experiences across many projects, I have come to deeply realize that "trust is built through consensus achieved via proper processes." The trust in W3C's standards and statements rests not only on their content but also on the trust in the processes through which they are developed. Given the rapid changes surrounding the Web today, I believe it is critical for W3C to adapt and continuously enhance these processes.

In particular, I see the importance of improving aspects such as:

Active listening and incorporation of diverse voices and expertise Encouraging broader member participation Properly focusing and setting key issues Ensuring transparency throughout the processes By working to improve these areas, I wish to give back to the Web ecosystem that has supported my professional journey and of course to the web users.

What I Aim to Achieve as an AB Member

To ensure that W3C standards and statements continue to be trusted globally, I will especially prioritize the following initiatives:

Designing and promoting incentives for active member participation. In particular, I aim to strengthen the participation of non-English-speaking members and the effective use of local communities to bring a wider range of perspectives into W3C activities. Building an environment that embraces diverse voices. I propose mechanisms that ensure that diverse opinions are heard, valuable insights are incorporated, and they are respected in decision-making. At the same time, recognizing the importance of efficiency, I will seek a balance between attentive listening and maintaining effective processes. Prioritizing key issues and promoting transparent tracking. I propose clearly highlighting the most critical issues among the many topics W3C addresses, allowing members to focus their attention with minimal overhead. Additionally, while Advice is a crucial role of the AB, I also believe that posing thoughtful Questions is equally important. By openly raising good questions, we can stimulate broader member engagement and active participation.

If given the opportunity to serve as an AB member, I will work together with W3C members aiming to ensure that W3C remains a trusted cornerstone of the Internet society for the next 30 years and beyond. I sincerely ask for your support.

Thank you very much.

Hiroshi Ota LY Corporation

Responses to questions from the participants at Meet the Candidates

My question is about candidates experience with leading an organization with members having different interests. How might you bring that experience to work as an AB?

For example, one of my roles in LY Corporation, where I work, is Open Source Program Office manager. LY Corporation was created two years ago through a company merger. Each original company already had its own Open Source Org, and each one had a different culture and policy. We built the new team gathering people from each company's Open Source Org. At the beginning it was hard because of different opinions, policies or culture. But now, we successfully work together as one team. As the manager, I kept a neutral position. I did not stand on either side of the original organizations. In fact, I stayed out of the details as much as possible and focused on facilitation and decision making. Next is support for minority members. Many members in the team speak Japanese, but some members don't. To keep communication barriers low, we provide live interpretation in meetings. We also run a term dictionary and use translation slack bots and so on. This matches W3C’s ideas about Diversity&Inclusion and accessibility. I must also thank W3C. My team values an environment where decision-making rules are clear and where we actively welcome reviews. Those just correspond to W3C's Process and Review. What I am doing comes directly from what I learned from W3C. I am grateful to W3C, and I believe my experience of applying W3C ideas internally and running them can be given back to W3C.

Do you have any kind of ideas of how to improve Member engagement and get more feedback on operation of W3C? How to get more engagement and involvement of the Members?

I think we should encourage more members to speak up. There are several ways to encourage participation and reduce barriers to speaking up. For example, when requesting a review, we should present the final output along with clearly summarized key points and context. This allows members to respond, focusing on specific, well-defined issues. It's not easy for everyone catching a big ball, reading and understanding the whole long documents and context. We can try to throw smaller balls to members. To lower the barrier for speaking up for the first time, support from the AB and mutual help among members are also important. And of course, support for non-English-native regions is also needed, including transcription, translation, and local assistance.

Responses to Questions

What are the challenges facing W3C as an organization in the next two years, and what skills and interests will you bring to the AB to help with addressing them?

Rapid social change is forcing W3C to re-examine its role and how it fulfils that role. We will have the W3C Vision, and Seth has shown strong commitment through the Strategic Roadmap. As we turn that Vision into concrete strategy, differences of opinion are likely to arise over the details. W3C can only deliver value to Web users if it has active and committed members; they are our essential asset. Broad member participation is the source of legitimacy for W3C consensus. The Vision’s User-First principle reinforces that legitimacy. For this reason, it is essential to build community-wide agreement based on the Vision, which the AB—elected by the members—developed together with its Task Force. I see two urgent challenges:

Turning the Vision into an actionable Strategy and pushing it forward.
Strengthening the “cross-over point” where user-first benefits for the Web as a whole meet the motivation of stakeholders, including members, to participate and collaborate.

W3C’s capability as a consensus platform is being tested: can it guide diverse stakeholders, even when they disagree, toward cooperative discussion and agreement? I believe my background in strategic planning, organisational management, and leading consensus across differing values can help to move this forward.

The AB has been discussing its role in the community and how it may need to be updated to reflect the new governance structure. What do you think the AB's role is, and what do you believe the AB needs to do to fulfill it?

One of the W3C’s important issues, as mentioned in my answer to Quetion1, is to strengthen the “cross-over point” where user-first benefits for the Web as a whole meet the motivation of stakeholders, including members, to participate and collaborate. Even if individual W3C activities or deliverables do not perfectly match every stakeholder’s expectations, it is vital to maintain a broad, high-level consensus. We must safeguard an environment of trust and cooperation, rooted in that broad perspective yet flexible enough to explore specifics. The AB can act as enablers: encouraging members and stakeholders to join user-first W3C work while providing timely, well-placed advice.

What do you think of the W3C Strategical Roadmap reported on AC2025? Which parts in it do you think W3C should prioritize in the coming year or 2?

The Roadmap’s “Our Future” statement—“To be the trusted gathering place for far-seeing technical experts and advocates about and for the Web”—must be backed by concrete action and become a stable foundation for the next several years. To make that real, we should:

Commit to the W3C Vision thoroughly and earn clear support for it from all stakeholders.
Offer compelling reasons for key stakeholders and experts to participate.
Guarantee a fair consensus process through broad member participation and appropriate review.

The immediate priority is to define the detailed Strategy that follows the Vision, build consensus around it, and commit to it. The next step will be to select a minimal set of top-priority goals, following the W3C Vision, and reach an “execution-ready” state under the Impact Framework.

Which AB priority projects (from https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB/2025_Priorities or new ones) do you want to personally spend time working on?

Following my answer to question 2, I believe the initiatives below are especially relevant, though my focus is not limited to them:

Improving Collaboration with the Team
Improving Communication Horizontally

Both initiatives can help lower participation barriers and make collaboration smoother.

What do you as an AB candidate believe W3C should be doing about the impact of AI or other emerging technologies on the Web?

AI will increasingly be built into automated systems in ways that users do not even notice. W3C’s long-standing work on interoperability therefore matters more than ever. With a User First mindset, W3C can provide user-friendly guidelines and open test suite. Beyond writing specifications, W3C should lead with ethical and transparent processes, evaluating how new technologies affect Web usage and trust. That requires wide participation by stakeholders, including domain experts, government bodies and so on, as well as an environment with open mindset where new stakeholders can join discussions and processes smoothly.

What is consensus to you and how important do you think it is to W3C? What are the tensions between moving fast and getting consensus? (from Elika)

A consensus process that includes discussions and reviews by diverse participants is essential to build trust. Issues around the Web will continue to grow, and it will be difficult for W3C to have all the needed expertise internally every time. We must make sure that other organizations and experts are drawn to join W3C because of its fair consensus process. To attract stakeholders without relying only on internal expertise, the consensus process must ensure Diversity & Inclusion (D&I), transparency, and fair rules. If we prioritize, too much, reaching agreement quickly and fail to maintain these principles, we may lose the participation of key stakeholders. We have to ballance it.

How do we encourage diverse voices to participate in the community, particularly those who don't have the support or time from their employers? (from Jeffrey Yasskin)

We need to reduce the burden of speaking up. For example, when asking for review, we should show the final output and clearly present the key points in a simple way, and allow responses to focus only on specific points. To lower the barrier for speaking up for the first time, support from the AB and mutual help among members are also important. Support for non-English-native regions is also needed, including transcription, translation, and local assistance.

Early in W3C's history, the tech industry collaborated on specs in SDOs then implemented interoperable interfaces in their proprietary products. Now, for example the various LLM interoperability APIs, they collaborate in OSS projects, which define de facto standards, which then may or may not get refined and ratified by SDOs.  How should the W3C Process and culture confront or adapt to this pattern? (from Michael Champion)

We need to have closer relationship with OSS communities and developers. If W3C set up a process to test key open-source software, making discussion based on those test, and send feedback to the open-source community, it can become the first step toward deeper cooperation with OSS community. We can consider gradually building a closer relationship with open-source communities, for example, by offering W3C’s consensus and review processes, while also strengthening mutual trust.