Re: The future of the W3C?

The part I am interested in is the following, what salaries people make is not of importance, but I found one section missing on the W3C website, that for annual reports.Items typically found in an annual report are organizational structure, divisions, operational units and activities during the year, and similar to corporate shareholder information, information about participating entities.

W3C needs to be truly representative
As the Board of Directors sets the organization’s strategy for investing in web standards work, its top priority should be maintaining the continued operation and relevance of W3C and the open process for developing the underlying protocols of the web. 

Diversity among this governance group is essential. While the elected directors are diverse across some dimensions (employed by some large companies and some small ones; men and women; people from different continents), this is not yet a multistakeholder group in the sense of representing all the different stakeholder sectors. The for-profit private sector is well-represented, and the host academic institutions will have voting seats on the board. Individuals primarily affiliated with governments and civil society organizations, though, are currently absent.

Those gaps are in large part a symptom of a longer-term, broader imbalance in participation at W3C, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and other internet standard-setting bodies. The current Board of Directors should seek out more diversity — including missing areas of expertise, and people affiliated with sectors beyond industry and academia — in additional directors they appoint. W3C also should invest in outreach, so that more of civil society is more deeply involved and more able to take on organizational governance. To fulfill the long-term potential of the web for people around the world, W3C Inc. should become a public interest non-profit organization that is diverse and multistakeholder through its governance and its membership.
There are many issues regarding the internet, e.g. data rights and privacy, the use of trustworthy, explainable and ethical artificial intelligence that would be well served by creating protocols and standards.
The creation of such is best accomplished by multi-stakeholder participation and the "nuts and bolts"standard making would greatly benefit from a more global representation across all Internet standards making bodies.
And the following underscores this:
To ensure that the web and the internet are directed towards the public’s needs, and not dominated by corporate interests from the wealthiest nations, sustained and sustainable engagement from more of civil society is necessary. Web and internet standards processes must become more inclusive: In order to be global organizations, standard-setting bodies need to provide infrastructure for first-class participation by those who cannot attend meetings in person and those who primarily speak languages other than English.  

And it would be recommendable to try to emulate the UN use of six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).


Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Project Paradigm: Bringing the ICT tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide through collaborative research on applied mathematics, advanced modeling, software and standards development 

    On Thursday, December 22, 2022 at 05:31:15 AM AST, Chaals Nevile <chaals@fastmail.fm> wrote:  
 
 To the extent that Nick Doty is a former W3C staff member, current AC rep and participant and candidate for the next Advisory Board, sure it's an outsider view. (To be fair, that describes me, too).
To be clear, since W3C is relevant to the world, there is a certain interest in what is happening. But that should be balanced against the right of W3C employees to a certain amount of privacy regarding the organisational details of their work because it's part of their own life, and the added difficulty that is imposed by having to manage everday organisational work with a million onlookers providing commentary and suggestions.

Essentially, as Danbri and Ivan have noted, this is about organisational management - who pays the staff, writes their contracts, etc. As Ivan noted, the latest news is different each day, as negotiations over what people keep and give up in the transition go down to the wire.
If you're a W3C member, this is relevant because W3C governance heavily involves the members (who for 25 years have been the people who pay to keep the whole thing going for the benefit not only of themselves but the rest of the world who use the Web).
From a perspective of participants in W3C standards development, there's little to see - in the end, things like the copyright statement and the postal address will change slightly, and if you were in the habit of calling W3C on a landline telephone or sending faxes, those numbers will likely stop working. For the rest, the Process that governs W3C's actual work will still be the Process (it gets updated most years, but overall it's recognisable as an evolution of the process first published in 1997). Staff turnover is a background constant. But URLs, mailing lists, email addresses and so on will follow the principles outlined a quarter-century ago in TimBL's "Cool URLs don't change" (an important lesson W3C learned from experience).
I suggest that there is very little to see here for this mailing list.
cheers
Chaals

On Thursday, 22 December 2022 06:36:53 (+01:00), ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program wrote:


Maybe some staff members could elaborate on the ongoing internal processes at W3C?
The following link provides AN OUTSIDER view:https://cdt.org/insights/changing-governance-at-w3c/

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Project Paradigm: Bringing the ICT tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide through collaborative research on applied mathematics, advanced modeling, software and standards development 

    On Wednesday, December 21, 2022 at 11:53:17 AM AST, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:  
 
 +1 to what Danbri said. 
Furthermore, things are evolving extremely fast, with meetings happening every day. By the time this mail goes out my SMTP server, it might already be outdated. So…
Ivan


On 19 Dec 2022, at 17:33, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:


On Mon, 19 Dec 2022 at 15:40, Martynas Jusevičius <martynas@atomgraph.com> wrote:

Hi,

Not sure why this is not all over the @w3.org mailing lists, but it
seems like the future of the W3C is at stake?

"At this point it looks like we will not have an operational W3C
nonprofit on Jan 1. Every Director will vote their conscience, but it
seems likely that the asset transfer will be rejected, leaving MIT
responsible for its contracts with W3C Members (for which they have
paid)."
https://twitter.com/robinberjon/status/1603835007323209729

What consequences does this have for the existing and future specifications?


With respect, I think this is a moment for considering the specific situation of the W3C Team at MIT - the staff whose employment is under threat from this mess. The specs will broadly be ok, and don’t need healthcare or a plan for paying rent/mortgage/heating in the coming weeks.
Dan




Martynas
atomgraph.com





----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +33 6 52 46 00 43


  

-- 
Chaals Nevile
Using Fastmail - it's worth it