Press Release: W3C re-ernergizes process for agile enhancement of Web technology and earlier Royalty-Free protection

Dear friends of W3C,

The Web Consortium has rolled out new operational changes at a time when the Web is increasingly essential as the world goes virtual.

Today marks the first day of operation of the 2020 edition of the W3C Process Document and W3C Patent Policy, whose timely updates increase our responsiveness and strengthen our standardization activities by adding a continuous standard development mode and earlier Royalty-Free protection for implementers. 

Society is going virtual so it needs a more robust Web that evolves more rapidly. Today's Process Document and Patent Policy afford us that reponsiveness, serving our mission to provide the key infrastructure for the Web.

The Web Consortium has been working on these enhancements for years, and their adoption now is particularly timely. They unlock agility and afford W3C the means to be a better standards organization and a more effective steward of the Web's full potential, able to do what the Web needs, better and faster.

Please see the press release at: https://www.w3.org/comm/assets/staging/press-releases/pressrelease-process-document-patent-policy-2020.html.en and as text below.

Please contact me to learn more or to schedule an interview.
 
Thank you. 
best,
Amy van der Hiel
W3C Media Relations Coordinator
------------------------------------------------

   [1]W3C For immediate release

      [1] 
https://www.w3.org/


 W3C re-ernergizes process for agile enhancement of Web technology and
                    earlier Royalty-Free protection

2020 updates of the Process Document and Patent Policy give a real boost
to building the Web
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   [2]Translations | [3]W3C Press Release Archive
     __________________________________________________________

      [2] 
https://www.w3.org/Press/Releases-2020#process-document-patent-policy-2020

      [3] 
https://www.w3.org/Press/


   [4]
https://www.w3.org/
 — 15 September 2020 — Today marks the
   first day of operation of the 2020 edition of the [5]W3C
   Process Document and [6]W3C Patent Policy, whose timely updates
   increase our responsiveness and strengthen our standardization
   activities by adding a continuous standard development mode and
   earlier Royalty-Free protection for implementers. The Web
   Consortium rolls out these operational changes at a time when
   the Web is increasingly essential as the world goes virtual.

      [4] 
https://www.w3.org/

      [5] 
https://www.w3.org/2020/Process-20200915/

      [6] 
ttps://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20200915/


  Society is going virtual so it needs a more robust Web that evolves
  more rapidly

   The 2020 global pandemic accelerated a trend for the world to
   go virtual, making the global Web even more critical to society
   –in information sharing, entertainment, commerce, real-time
   communications, and many more. The Web has also grown in
   importance to industries conducting business online. These
   trends demand responsiveness and agility from the Web's
   standardization processes and practices. Today's Process
   Document and Patent Policy afford us that reponsiveness,
   serving our mission to provide the key infrastructure for the
   Web.

   The Web Consortium has been working on these enhancements for
   years, and their adoption now is particularly timely. They
   unlock agility and afford W3C the means to be a better
   standards organization and a more effective steward of the
   Web's full potential, able to do what the Web needs, better and
   faster.

  Landmark standard-making agility to better reflect the transformation
  the Web needs

   Among the changes to the W3C Process Document, the most
   anticipated ones offer a real boost in helping the Web serve
   the community:
     * streamlined community review and review for integrity
       (Horizontal review to ensure accessibility,
       internationalization, privacy, and security);
     * flexibility for multiple work modes, including stability of
       referenced versions and reflection of the current status in
       the technical reports list;
     * a continuous development mode that enables specifications
       to reflect rapidly developing technology –including a
       living standard approach as a native capability of the W3C
       Recommendation Track.

   The Process facilitates updates of specifications to better
   match the consensus of working groups. By the same token, the
   W3C Process Document improves maintainability of
   specifications, including easier revision of Recommendations.

   These additive improvements give developers an accurate view of
   the state of a specification or its implementations, and ensure
   accuracy of the specifications at any stage, thus removing
   significant confusion between e.g., the editor's draft on
   GitHub and the published version on the W3C website, while
   maintaining the same review and quality requirements that the
   Recommendation Track currently possesses.

   At the level of the standardization process, working groups
   will no longer be required to bring their entire specifications
   back several steps for a single line of change. At the level of
   the robustness and reliability of the platform, algorithms can
   be updated for maintenance and security purposes, reducing
   confusion for developers and implementers: the specifications
   on the W3C website will be the state of the art. For
   long-running specifications, bringing some of the value of W3C
   Recommendations sooner means early implementations can safely
   flourish, smoothing the path to adoption.

  Securing earlier Royalty-Free protection while preserving the stable,
  trusted patent policy

   These critical improvements required an important change to the
   W3C Patent Policy –the first major update to this
   groundbreaking document since its drafting in 2004 and
   introduction to the world in 2005– to provide patent protection
   earlier.

   The update preserves our royalty-free promise on
   Recommendations, making core Web technologies available for RF
   implementation and use with a licensing commitment from
   participants. New in this Policy update is to secure those
   royalty-free commitments at earlier Candidate phases,
   supporting unencumbered implementation and use even as
   specifications continue to evolve. This change helps to de-risk
   Web experimentation and reinforce access to the Web's
   technology as common infrastructure.

About the World Wide Web Consortium

   The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to lead
   the Web to its full potential by creating technical standards
   and guidelines to ensure that the Web remains open, accessible,
   and interoperable for everyone around the globe. W3C well-known
   standards HTML and CSS are the foundational technologies upon
   which websites are built. W3C works on ensuring that all
   foundational Web technologies meet the needs of civil society,
   in areas such as accessibility, internationalization, security,
   and privacy. W3C also provides the standards that undergird the
   infrastructure for modern businesses leveraging the Web, in
   areas such as entertainment, communications, digital
   publishing, and financial services. That work is created in the
   open, provided for free and under the groundbreaking W3C Patent
   Policy. For its work to make online videos more accessible with
   captions and subtitles, W3C received a 2016 Emmy Award. And for
   its work to standardize a Full TV Experience on the Web, W3C
   received a 2019 Emmy Award.

   W3C's vision for "One Web" brings together thousands of
   dedicated technologists representing more than 400 [7]Member
   organizations and dozens of industry sectors. W3C is jointly
   hosted by the [8]MIT Computer Science and Artificial
   Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the
   [9]European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
   (ERCIM) headquartered in France, [10]Keio University in Japan
   and [11]Beihang University in China. For more information see
   [12]
https://www.w3.org/.


      [7] 
https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List

      [8] 
https://www.csail.mit.edu/

      [9] 
https://www.ercim.eu/

     [10] 
https://www.keio.ac.jp/

     [11] 
http://ev.buaa.edu.cn/

     [12] 
https://www.w3.org/


   End Press Release

Media Contact

   Amy van der Hiel, W3C Media Relations Coordinator
   <[13]w3t-pr@w3.org>
  mailto:w3t-pr@w3.org

   +1.617.253.5628 (US, Eastern Time)
     __________________________________________________________

   [14]Translations | [15]W3C Press Release Archive

     [14] 
https://www.w3.org/Press/Releases-2020#process-document-patent-policy-2020

     [15] 
https://www.w3.org/Press/

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2020 13:26:42 UTC