Re: Public concerns over new W3C logo

> Perhaps the team felt, correctly, that they would get a lot of feedback, some of it conflicting, and they wanted to avoid “design by committee”. The problem is that the choice is not whether or not to get the feedback; it’s whether you get it in time to take it into account, before adoption, or you get it when it’s more difficult and embarrassing, after adoption. 

By analogy to the Recommendations and Statements, the AC does not have any interest in designing these by committee.  The responsibility is delegated to smaller groups with the relevant expertise … BUT they don’t get released until the AC has “consensus” (in the W3C Process sense) that they represent the collective opinion of W3C.

Something similar for branding material would have avoided the current mess.  The new mission statement would probably have been approved with little dissent, but it’s clear that the new logo would have gotten a number of Formal Objections.  

But it would have been more efficient to simply do a REAL poll of the AC early on: Do you prefer the old logo or the proposed logo, and how strongly?  The sense I got from the Team’s logo reveal, however,  was “this is what we’re going to do, and we assume you will find it as modern and energizing as we do, and if you disagree we don’t care because it’s all subjective.”

Bottom line for me: Neither the Board nor the AC should be doing design by committee on standards, logos, or strategies for that matter.   Pragmatic leaders will do exercise appropriate transparency and due diligence to sound out and assess the range of opinions, and consider whether dissenters have a point.  There will NOT be unanimous agreement on anything, and that’s why we have the AC (for standards), the Board (for governance matters) and the CEO (for most everything else) empowered to make binding decisions.  

BUT the decisions makers MUST be held accountable for the success of their decisions. 

> On Oct 22, 2025, at 9:57 AM, David Singer <singer@mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Oct 22, 2025, at 09:23, Steve Capell <steve@pyx.io> wrote:
>> 
>> I my have missed it but I don’t remember any member consultation about whether to rebrand, only on the form of the rebranding 
> 
> In a member-based organization, you have to expect that people will care about the organization image and especially logo. Perhaps the team felt, correctly, that they would get a lot of feedback, some of it conflicting, and they wanted to avoid “design by committee”. The problem is that the choice is not whether or not to get the feedback; it’s whether you get it in time to take it into account, before adoption, or you get it when it’s more difficult and embarrassing, after adoption. 
> 
> I’m not sure whether having the AC vote on a logo would be helpful or appropriate. But the members have a Board that they elected and empowered to listen and make hard decisions, and the Board is perfectly capable of listening, taking concerns into account, and balancing member concerns against design by committee. It’s a small enough body to make decisions, can meet quietly with the team when needed, and has the judgment on what is a strategic, image, matter of concern to the members and Board, and what is appropriately left to management and experts. Notably, I don’t think the Board should attempt a logo design themselves, and they know it.
> 
> 
> David Singer
> 
> singer@mac.com
>