- From: Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 23:00:28 +0200
- To: Don Simon <donxymon@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-pwe@w3.org
On Tue, 19 Sep 2017 09:15:52 +0000, Don Simon <donxymon@gmail.com> wrote: > It is disappointing to see that your leaders have decided to ignore their > ethical, professional, and moral obligations, in favor of kick backs from > entertainment companies. It is disappointing that your organization did > not think to include enforcable consequences for corruption at the highest > levels. One wonders why you would bother to work for an organization whose > current mission is directly opposed to the foundational principles. The > most logical reason is that you care nothing for any principle except > selfish greed. > > Hopeless@pacifier.com Dear Mr. Simon, We are sorry that you feel this way and we thank you for writing about this contentious topic. Our leaders have led and facilitated a very divisive debate both among the W3C Membership and Web community, but that is one that touches on society at large. To quote from a blog post [0] our CEO published yesterday, "DRM has been used for decades prior to the EME debate. But in recent years it is a credit to the world wide web that the web has become the delivery vehicle for everything, including movies. Accordingly it was inevitable that we would face issues of conflicting values and the appropriate accommodations for commercial use of the web." W3C is a technical standards body and thus, the debate helped improve the specification in areas of security, privacy, and accessibility. Regarding not including enforceable consequences for corruption at the highest levels, I confess I am not sure what your concerns are. We follow the W3C Process Document which describes the organizational structure of the W3C and the processes related to the responsibilities and functions they exercise to enable W3C to accomplish its mission to lead the Web to its full potential. Futhermore, W3C has co-signed with IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Internet Society, a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards: https://open-stand.org/openstandlaunch/ We take at heart our principles and selfish greed is far from being among our principles. W3C is a Membership organization, which means that Members pay a fee to contribute to setting the agenda of the Open Web Platform, to participate in W3C technical work and to send engineers to conduct that work, but our Process is built around community work and throughout the standardization track our Process ensures our work is reviewed. Section 6.2.3.1 “Wide Review” of the Process document [1], in particular: "The objective is to ensure that the entire set of stakeholders of the Web community, including the general public, have had adequate notice of the progress of the Working Group, and were able to actually perform reviews of and provide comments on the specification. A second objective is to encourage groups to request reviews early enough that comments and suggested changes can still be reasonably incorporated in response to the review. Before approving transitions, the Director will consider who has been explicitly offered a reasonable opportunity to review the document, who has provided comments, the record of requests to and responses from reviewers, especially W3C Horizontal Groups and groups identified as dependencies in the charter or identified as liaisons, and seek evidence of clear communication to the general public about appropriate times and which content to review and whether such reviews actually occurred." Wide Review is a requirement and such review needs to be demonstrated as part of W3C work to proceed through the various maturity levels [2]. [0] https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/09/reflections-on-the-eme-debate/ [1] https://www.w3.org/2017/Process-20170301/#wide-review [2] https://www.w3.org/2017/Process-20170301/#maturity-levels We recently made available a number of materials that may be helpful, in particular: * Backgrounder on Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) https://www.w3.org/2017/07/EME-backgrounder.html * Press release: W3C Publishes Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a W3C Recommendation https://www.w3.org/2017/09/pressrelease-eme-recommendation.html.en Kind regards, Coralie Mercier, Head of W3C Marketing & Communications -- Coralie Mercier - W3C Marketing & Communications - https://www.w3.org mailto:coralie@w3.org +336 4322 0001 https://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/
Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2017 21:00:33 UTC