New Staff/New Office: Some Practical Information

This page tries to collect some practical information relevant for a new office staff member; its goal is to help you through the first few steps. If not only you are a new staff member of an old office, but you are also in a new office, the second half of the paper might be interesting to you as well!

In case of questions please contact your Offices coordinator.

New staff member

Access rights

Because you are staff member of a W3C member, you might already have a web login name and password. If not, get one immediately. Then, you should give the Offices Team (team-offices@w3.org ):

your user name
the email address you would like to get your emails on
your personal data (phone and fax number, etc)
(reference to) a small photograph
a short (1-2 paragraphs) CV

Based on these information, the Head Offices will take care of:

giving you the access rights as an office staff, which will allow you to access to office information
if you want, setting up an email alias of the form xxxx@w3.org, pointing at your email address of choice
updating the general staff page
preparing an announcement of the staff change on the web site, using your CV

Most of the URI-s listed below are protected, and you should have the proper access rights before using them.

You should also have a W3C business card. You will have to send all the necessary data to the Head of Offices. It is a good idea to have the cards either in your local language only or two-sided (local + English). The choice will depend on the perceived needs in your region. If your language uses a non-ASCII character set, the best is if you can produce an EPS file or an Adobe Illustrator file with all your data. If you do that, do not forget to 'outline' the characters in AI before you send it to us: this will turn the font characters into geometric curves, ie, there will be no dependence on a particular font any more. This will help avoiding mistakes. The data should include: name, role in office (eg, manager, coordinator), surface mail address, phone, fax, mobile.

(Note: we plan to streamline the process of business cards, and we may be able then to give you a template that you can use to print the cards locall, if you have the necessary facilities.)

Offices Team (team-offices@w3.org )

J. Alan Bird (Global Business Development Leader) runs the W3C Offices Team . He is the persons you will have to work with very often. Marie-Claire Forgue from the communications team usually comes to our telecon meetings, so you will "meet" her soon.

Although not in the communication team, you should also remember the name of Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org). He is responsible for the W3C internationalization activity. You will certainly have to contact him at some point (unless you are in an English speaking country...).

Membership contact and recruiting is the primary responsibility of Karen for MIT, Marie-Claire for ERCIM, and Yasuyuki for Japan.

Practical information

Your primarily starting point is the Office's home page at W3C, which is the publicly visible face of the Offices. Furthermore, the Offices' wiki page contain a large set of links and information on resources that can help the everyday activity of the Office. This wiki is editable to you but is under user/password control, ie, accessible by the W3C Team and Office staff only. For example you may also want to look at the minutes of earlier meeting (phone and face-to-face); there is a separate page on the wiki for this.

Communication with the offices uses a separate mailing list, namely w3c-office-pr@w3.org. All mails sent to that list is archived on the W3C mailing list archive; this is very useful to dig out earlier mails (the archive is restricted to W3C Team and the Office staff). The addressees of this list is managed by the Offices Team ; it includes the office staff members, some members of the W3C communication team and other persons of the W3C Team, as well as the CEO of W3C.

Meetings

As you may know by now, we have two types of meeting: a monthly telecon meeting and one face-to-face meeting a year.

Telecon meeting: There is a very intoductory mail on the infrastructure of meetings by Alan.
These meetings are usually held on the first Monday of the month, although we may change the date in some specific cases if there are scheduling difficulties; see the wiki page for further details. The usual schedule of those meetings is that each office gets a 2 minutes slot to give the highlights of what happened the past month, and then some specific issues are discussed. This may be preceded by a presentation of a W3C team member giving an overview of one of the "hot" items in W3C. Each office ought to send its own 2 minutes' report to the mailing list before the meeting. The reports follow a relatively strict format for the order and classification of things, so that they could be comparable more easily.
Face to face meeting: This is more of a discussion meeting. On the first day the Offices Team give a general overview of the events on the last year, the goal is to collect discussion issues that are important for the meeting. Usually, there is also a presentation of the W3C management on the current state of W3C, again to collect discussion issues. The rest of the meeting is usually centered around those issues.

New Office

If you are setting up a new office, there are certain steps you have to take to "incorporate" the new office into the rest of the team.

Office Logos: You should choose the exact name of your office in the local language and send this to the Offices Team . If your local language uses non-ASCII characters (Korean, Chinese, Tamil, etc), the best is if you can produce the name in Adobe Illustrator. Do not forget to use the "outlining" property of Illustrator, which turns each character into a set of curves (thereby getting rid of the dependency of a particular font). The Offices Team will care for the final logo in gif, png, eps, and svg formats.
Local Web site: Look at the other web sites to feel the "style". You should (needless to say...) use valid markup for all pages, XHTML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1 (preferably the latter). The CSS style file should should use is http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/officeFloats.css. Beware: the Offices Team regularly checks those pages for validity and content...;-)
One page description of your host: You should prepare a one-page description of your hosting institution, including the staff members, in English. The best is to store that page on your web site, and send the URI to the Offices Team . Look at some of the existing pages for examples.
One page description of staff, routes, etc: You should also have a one-page description of the staff address, the routes to your institution, etc, in local language(s). The Office Staff page will then link to that page (see there for examples).
Secure the W3C domain: If you can, you should should secure the w3c domain locally (eg, w3c.nl, w3c.org.il, etc, depending on the local usage). If you are successful, this URI should point at your web site; this is then the URI officially used by W3C.
Complete Staff: You may have several staff members at the Office. All staff members should go through the registration; you should then give a full list of the staff to the Offices Team , so that he/she can update the official Office Staff page. You should also provide a photograph of the hosting institution.

J. Alan Bird, Global Business Development Leader (abird@w3.org)
Last revised: $Date: 2011/08/01 14:36:26 $

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