Tantek Çelik

Nomination Statement

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

Tantek Çelik is nominated by Mozilla Foundation.

Nomination statement from Tantek Çelik:

Hi, I'm Tantek Çelik and I'm running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to build on the momentum the AB has built with transitioning W3C to a community-led and values-driven organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 25 years.

I am Mozilla's Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013, with a two year break before returning in 2020. In early years I drove the movement to shift W3C to more open licenses for specifications, and more responsiveness to the needs of open source communities and independent website publishers.

Most recently on the AB I led the AB's Priority Project for a W3C Vision as contributor and editor, taking it through wide review, and consensus at the AB to a vote by the AC to adopt the Vision as an official W3C statement.

Previously I also co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group that produced several widely interoperably deployed Social Web Standards. Mastodon and other open source software projects built a social network on ActivityPub and other social web specs which now require maintenance from implementation experience. As such, I have participated in the Social Web Incubator Community Group and helped draft a new charter to restart the Social Web Working Group and maintain these widely adopted specifications.

With several members stepping down, the AB is experiencing much higher than usual turnover in this election.

I am running for re-election to both help with continuity, on the Vision project and other efforts, and work with new and continuing Advisory Board members to build a fresh, forward looking focus for the AB.

I believe governance of W3C, and advising thereof, is most effectively done by those who have the experience of actively collaborating in working groups producing interoperable specifications, and especially those who directly create on the web using W3C standards. This direct connection to the actual work of the web is essential to prioritizing the purpose & scope of governance of that work.

Beyond effective governance, the AB has played the more crucial role of a member-driven change agent for W3C. While the Board and Team focus on the operations of keeping the W3C legal entity running smoothly, the AB has been and should continue to be where Members go to both fix problems and drive forward-looking improvements in W3C to better fulfill our Vision and Mission.

I have Mozilla's financial support to spend my time pursuing these goals, and ask for your support to build the broad consensus required to achieve them.

I post on my personal site tantek.com. You may follow my posts there or from Mastodon: @tantek.com@tantek.com

If you have any questions or want to chat about the W3C Advisory Board, Values, Vision, or anything else W3C related, please reach out by email: tantek at mozilla.com. Thank you for your consideration. This statement is also published publicly on my blog.

Responses to Questions

1. 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?

W3C faces several challenges in the next two years, here are a few that require immediate attention:

Completing a transition to Member-led. With the changes from a consortium of institutions to a Legal Entity and from Director-led to a Director-free Process, the W3C has taken big steps towards becoming a Member-led organization. However the transition is incomplete: while the Process is now Director-free, in many instances those powers were given to the CEO, not members. While a majority of the Board is member-elected, it is not focusing on driving changes at W3C. This puts the onus of this work on the AB, as the primary change agent at W3C, to continue driving W3C's governance and processes to be more Member-led.
Loss of focus. The Strategical Roadmap is too broad to provide effective leadership for W3C to focus on and be effective on its most important goals and deliverables. In my opinion W3C's primary goal needs to be regular publishing and maintenance of high-quality, practical, interoperable web standards for the world, that are aligned with our Vision and Mission. Focusing Working Groups requires both the will to only charter them when they have a likely path to producing user-impactful interoperability across multiple implementations, and saying no to standardizing single-implementation technologies or specifications that allow implementations to claim compliance without interoperating.
Loss of members. W3C has lost several key members in recent years. Two former Board members have left W3C along with their employers.

W3C has many other challenges, however, like many things, we must focus on the most important challenges rather than a long list, in order to make good progress on a few challenges rather than little to no progress on lots of challenges.

Many of these challenges (and many aspects thereof) will require actions by different leadership groups at W3C: the TAG, the AB, and the Board.

The AB in particular can continue driving member-led changes in the Process. I have encourage the Process CG to do so, and participate by reviewing changes, providing feedback & suggestions accordingly, and raising issues when necessary.

In my years of experience on the AB, I have helped drive the AB to focus on key priority projects, both by example in the Vision and Defining the Three Is, and by providing encouragement and support of my AB colleagues on the other priority projects.

I have also helped drive focus in the AB's selection of Priority Projects to have a greater chance of success of impactful progress on a few projects, rather than having too many projects and diluting our efforts among them.

The last challenge, losing membership, is something the AB needs to help drive both the Board and Team to develop practices to better understand both the top reasons why members are choosing to leave, and on the positive side, what are the top reasons that members choose to stay? We must both reduce attrition and reinforce retention.

2. 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?

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading:

When we consider the role of the AB within W3C, and we look at W3C, I think we need to focus. We need to ask "what we are here to do?"

We need to say why we, W3C, are here. We are here to make high quality, practical, interoperable web standards for the world, that are aligned with our Vision and Mission.

Keeping that in mind is more than a list of bullet points. If you list 20 things, that's not focus, on the contrary listing 20 things risks losing focus.

Our high quality, practical, interoperable web standards are our product. That's why we are here.

The W3C has technical working groups that produce that product, the TAG, and governance groups.

The role of the AB is defined in that context of W3C and its groups. The Board has an explainer. The AB has a guide that's being expanded on GitHub.

To summarize: the Board is there to keep things running, to be a proper legal entity. The AB has been the change agent at W3C. When the world changes, the W3C needs to change. We need to adapt as quickly as possible.

We the AB need to be a change agent. We need the AB to be taking action, to contribute to change, to help W3C remain relevant and respected for web standards. We need this to be a primary goal of the AB and support W3C groups, especially Working Groups, efficiently produce high-quality standards.

We may need to reconsider the name "Advisory Board"; the 'advisory' part in particular. That has not been strictly true for a long time and may give a misleading impression of the AB's role and scope. The AB does advise, yes. However the AB shines when it takes action and when it effects changes.

I'd like to see the AB be more of an action board rather than an advisory board.

3. 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?

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading.

Despite being on the AB and having read the Strategical Roadmap, I find it quite high-level, and needing more focus.

There's a lot there, but to be an effective strategy we need to whittle it down to what are we really doing, what is our work product?

It says to make us the best gathering place but a gathering place is a means, not an end. W3C is not meant to be a social club, but to be an organization that produces high-quality interoperable web standards for the world.

That kind of clear objective is missing from this strategic roadmap.

A roadmap should tell you how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

The current Strategical Roadmap does not provide that in terms of what the W3C is here to do, to produce such high-quality standards.

One of the ways we can achieve the stated goals in the roadmap of attracting more people and diversity is through nimbleness and timeliness.

There's a lot that W3C can do or change to be more efficient. There are many aspects of the process that can be improved, are being improved. We must shift how W3C does its work to be more in line with modern ways of working on the Web, and with the Web, to more efficiently produce high-quality interoperable web standards for the world.

4. 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?

Vision 1.1 and 2.0 Now that we have completed the first version of the Vision which is making its way through the Process towards becoming an official W3C Statement, I want to work on a version 1.1 of the Vision to address the issues that we postponed in order to ship our 1.0. While this first version of the Vision largely captured existing consensus on what W3C is here to do, I also see an opportunity to work on a bolder Vision 2.0 that explores bigger and bolder questions of how W3C can have an even greater positive impact on the Web, and what stronger steps W3C can take to reduce harms from the Web.
Defining 3Is In the past couple of years we have made great progress on better defining what does it mean to have independent, interoperable implementations, and I want to take the best practices that we have identified and codify into regular practice at W3C in the form of one or more guides, notes, statements, and more explicit charter requirements and checks in the Process to raise the quality bar of the web standards we produce.

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

Whether AI or other emerging technologies, the W3C should be doing the following:

Providing a welcoming venue for innovators and implementers to discuss and collaborate. CGs can serve some of this role, but it also requires some amount of technical leadership and bridge-building.
Drive early documentation of potential hazards. One of the biggest ways that W3C can "do good" is lead harm reduction efforts such as clearly documenting, communicating, and warning nascent and established industries about potentially hazardous or harmful aspects of emerging web technologies.
Help shape emerging technologies towards more user-centric designs and user-impactful interoperability. By combining those first two steps, W3C can provide venues for developing standards that align with W3C's Vision and Values for technologies that are both designed to benefit users first (while minimizing harms) and through interoperability, for users to have a choice in the implementations they choose to use.

Questions asked during live sessions

1. 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?

2025-05-20 asked by Elika.

IETF has found a good balance of moving quickly and getting consensus by following the practices of "Rough consensus and running code."

W3C has a similar (but not the same) approach in its development of technical specifications, requiring both consensus on technical decisions and multiple interoperable implementations in order to advance a Candidate Recommendation to Recommendation status per the Process.

In most cases this works to produce high quality standards, however almost always at a very high time cost, both in human hours spent, and perhaps worse, in total calendar time (many years in many instances) spent from incubation to First Public Working Draft to Recommendation.

The harsh reality is that W3C is in general very slow at producing high-quality Recommendations, and it deserves deeper investigation into why, especially reasons having to do with perhaps over-indexing on consensus on all discussions. There are likely opportunities to improve the W3C Process accordingly.

For new technical specifications and features, there tends to be a sense that we can afford to take more time to reach consensus on technical decisions, since the status quo absence of such specifications and features isn’t really harming anyone (with some exceptions for accessibility and internationalization). Thus for new technical work, especially new features, I believe it is better to lean towards taking more time to resolve any conflicts, and reach a broader consensus before moving forward, rather than submitting to any specific implementer pressures to ship something on an artificial product ship schedule.

For fixes to published technical specifications, there is a greater need to get updated specifications published, to avoid the imminent harms of incorrect implementations of the existing published specifications, or mistakes from those specs being propagated into developer tutorials, articles, books etc. Thus for errata to technical work, I believe it is better to lean towards moving forward more quickly with such changes when a group reaches a clear "rough consensus" among implementers of that technical work. Such fixes should not be blocked by non-implementers, while any objections or differences of opinion should be recorded with their reasoning, to allow more informed re-evaluation and verification of such decisions in the future if necessary.

From my experience on our governance bodies, many improvements to our processes (the Process document itself and various Guides), our ways of working, and in some cases even some priority projects have been greatly delayed or outright blocked by a misunderstanding or misuse of "consensus" to mean "unanimity" in practice.

Governance is an area where delays are roughly equivalent to doing nothing and reinforcing the status quo. Any harms we are experiencing in the status quo are thus reinforced and supported by delays in making changes.

The problem is, if you take any particular governance proposal, and rather than frame it as requiring "consensus" to move forward on that proposal, and instead look at as comparing the support of the proposal vs. support of the status quo, it becomes very clear that there is a double-standard being applied:

changes require consensus support
keeping the status quo does not require consensus support

Our governance bodies try to avoid taking votes (with the exception of the Board, when their processes require it). I believe it is long past time for our governance and leadership bodies to start considering proposals in terms of comparing:

support for a change proposal
support for the status quo

And when there is clear support for a change proposal, perhaps with explicitly fewer objections to the change than the status quo, the governing body should take a vote and move forward, rather than inconsistently requiring consensus for change, in the face of not requiring consensus to keep the status quo.

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

2025-05-20 asked by Jeffrey Yasskin.

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading:

I appreciate hearing from and seeing new candidates, the AB can use new ideas and new energy to move forward and achieve our goals.

To Jeffrey's point about demographics, there are two women running for the AB. Rank them 1 and 2 if you want to see diversity. At a minimum at least rank them in the top 5. We're losing two incredibly talented members with Wendy and Elika stepping down.

I want to work with new voices. And it's a bit self deprecating yet I ask you to be more critical of incumbents. We (incumbents) do have a track record, but you should ask and assess if we have advanced the right goals, if we can show the work we have done during our time on the AB.

An Invited Expert fund makes sense to make it possible for people to participate who might not have the resources themselves, or from their employer.

Over the years, several of us have done explicit outreach to encourage a greater diversity of candidates to run for the AB. Funding is one thing. However, reaching out to people explicitly and encouraging them to run for the AB has made all the difference in the actual outcome of a more diverse AB. Everyone here on this call is a leader of some sort, on an elected body or an AC rep. I am asking you to reach out and encourage diverse voices to participate in W3C governance activities and AB projects like the Process and Vision, and with such experience, run for the AB.

3. 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?

2025-05-20 asked by Michael Champion.

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading, and some updates/corrections:

Mike asked a good question. I mentioned that the product of W3C is high-quality interoperable web standards for the world.

There's the challenge of how people do standardization. W3C has not always adapted.

W3C is using GitHub now to develop specifications and discuss issues, and thus contributing to standards work is more accessible to more people than it was before. However, it still takes too many hard to understand and follow steps to publish and update specifications at W3C.

While the LLM industry is shipping products, W3C is talking about workshops for AI.

There are some aspects of the Process that need to be improved to attract industry collaboration. Some aspects the AB has worked on, yet from where we see collaboration is actually happening, there is a lot of room for improvement at W3C.

There are many accepted W3C norms or practices, both cultural and operational, that need to be rebooted, rethought, or dumped to be more welcoming and inviting to new industries that are used to the lower barriers to collaboration in OSS projects.

There are very few workshops which have had any impact since the 2004 workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents. I'm not sure that model works any more. It may be ok for academia. It might not be as relevant for new and emerging standards.

Workshops have produced results when they have focused on documenting problems, rather than hyping new technologies. The 2020 IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem and 2023 W3C Workshop Secure the Web Forward were good examples of this.

Another positive exception was the 2013 Workshop on Social Standards which led to launching the very successful Social Web Working Group. Some workshops have also helped migrate established practices in other media to the web. The 2018 W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation (from Manga to Magazines) was a good example of this.

We should learn from the best practices of other standards organizations and evolve our methods to use modern practices rather than sticking with how it's always been done.

4. Regarding candidates experience with leading an organization with members having different interests, how might you bring that experience to work as an AB member?

Entire original question:

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?

2025-05-20 asked by Michiko.

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading, and some updates/corrections:

When I read Michiko's question, I thought of a couple different ways to address this. Those of us who are incumbents, ask the AC to hold us to our track record of leading efforts on the AB. Those of us on the AB have been responsible for leading various priority projects.

To answer the question for myself, in the most recent set of Priority Projects, I led two: the Vision, and the 3 I's: Independent Interoperable Implementations.

On the Vision priority project, I led the project and I was an editor of the Vision itself, working with another editor and a chair. I learned, to be an effective leader when there are different viewpoints, you have to work with good collaborators. You can't be a solo leader. You have to work with other leaders. You will run into conflicts, differences of opinion, and when that happens, to lead effectively, you have to call on your collaborators to handle differences in opinion instead of trying to do it yourself. Fortunately we were able to navigate that together, and I'm grateful to be working with Max and Chris Wilson to get Vision to vote in the AC.
The Three I's priority project is still very much in development. One way I chose to try to incorporate different ideas and interests was to allow editing and gathering and conclusions on our W3C wiki: independent, interoperable, implementations. Just like in Wikipedia, as best we can we try to capture different viewpoints even when they are at odds. Capturing a spectrum of those viewpoints is essential for coming up with the best answers. We ask the AC to hold us to a high standard.

5. What are your ideas to improve Member engagement and involvement, and get more feedback on the operations of W3C?

Entire original question:

My question is about Member engagement. Getting consensus is hard, but more important is to get more feedback from Members. We have moved to a legal entity. As the AB we are currently discussing an AB Explainer. One of the roles of AB is to advocate on behalf of Members to the Team. If we don't have any feedback from Members, we can't advocate to the leaders. 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?

2025-05-20 asked by Igarashi

My answer from the 2025-05-20 Meet the Candidates meeting, edited for grammar and readability, lightly hyperlinked for further reading, and some updates/corrections:

Thanks Igarashi-san for the question. One of the most important roles where we need to improve member participation are AC Reviews, both of Charters and CRs being proposed to advance to Recommendations.

Another role we often depend on Member participation for is chairing Working Groups.

And perhaps most importantly, what I've observed as the most critical role in W3C for producing specifications, is the technical editor(s) of a specification.

If we go back to the goal of W3C, or what is the productive output of W3C, of those high-quality interoperable technical standards of the Web for the world, we quickly see that the most essential and critical roles are our editors. That's something AB can focus on. Ask editors, what are extra tasks you're doing, how can we make editing technical documents easier?

The list of successful editors is too short. It's up to chairs to provide good support for editors. And it's up to our Charters to support the Working Group and Chairs in producing Recommendations.

We have to start from work product, look at the roles that are essential to that, and make those as easy as possible for Members to lead and contribute to.