Re: The future of the W3C?

I agree with almost everything you suggest (there's a small caveat below, 
as well as a note that your suggestions are generally pretty mainstream in 
W3C governance thinking). But unless you're trying to develop a coherent 
position from the "W3C Semantic Web community", I suggest that the 
W3Process Community Group, rather than this mailing list, is the place for 
productive discussion on that topic (whereas there I doubt you will find a 
productive discussion on any technical question revolving around "the 
semantic web" - and I would argue in that group that such discussions don't 
belong there anyway).

On Thursday, 22 December 2022 15:21:56 (+01:00), 
ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program wrote:


W3C needs to be truly representative

[...] W3C Inc. should become a public interest non-profit organization that 
is diverse and multistakeholder through its governance and its membership.



Yes. That is in fact the purpose of W3C Inc. So the people who have worked 
together to make it happen over the last decade or two seem to agree.


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


Perhaps. In practice as well as english there is a lot of support for 
French and Chinese (mostly Mandarin as far as spoken language, and 
simplified as for written form although there are significant resources 
produced in traditional chinese by the chinese-speaking community outside 
the PRC), with a large proportion of W3C staff having one of those as a 
day-to-day language. There is a reasonable amount of capacity for Spanish, 
but less formal support than there was when Ivan Herman's primary job was 
managing W3C Offices. I can only agree with you about Arabic.


I am one of surprisingly few people who have directly represented a 
russian-speaking organisation at W3C. I would love to see W3C produce more 
material in Russian, both for when Russia becomes a country to do business 
with and more immediately for the very large russian-speaking community 
outside Russia (a number of whom participate on behalf of organisations 
that don't use much Russian language, typically from Europe or anglophone 
North America). But I think there are other languages (Portuguese, Korean, 
perhaps Swahili, Hindi, German, ...) that should probably get higher 
prority from whatever resources W3C can offer internationalisation.



The UN language policies are an outcome of geopolitics, and a 
multi-stakeholder process would do well to consider the communities who are 
part of it. For all that global power has long reaching influence on the 
languages people use, as a shorthand to guide language choices it can 
equally entrench positions that act against diversity and inclusion.


cheers

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