This is the list of nominees for the 2017 Special Election to the W3C Advisory Board (AB). Each person has been nominated by at least one W3C Member according to the AB election process.
The W3C Membership elects the AB. For this election W3C will fill one seat.
Note: The deadline for votes is 23:59 ET, 11 October 2017.
The following statements were sent about the nominees (in alphabetical order by nominee family name):
As I shared with everyone last spring, prior to the AB election, I have strong ideals for what I believe the W3C can be, and how we must change. When I look at the W3C home page [1] I see our public face. This is where we are telling the world what is important to us. There are three things listed on the left column that exemplify the reasons I’m excited that I am able to say “we” in the previous sentence, and not “you”: Publishing, Accessibility, and Internationalization. These are the reasons I’m a part of the W3C now, they are the things I am passionate about, and they are the reasons I’m running for the AB.
The AB is a team, but it is a team the represents the W3C as a whole. They are the group that is representing your specific interests, as well as representing the interests and direction of the W3C. While we need individuals who have the skills, time, and ability to help guide, direct, and solve the issues at hand (and those that are coming!), we also want to make sure that the AB as a team represents us as a whole.
I had the opportunity to meet many of your in Beijing last April, when I presented the update on Publishing. I’ve been told that my passion and excitement were clearly communicated, but as your (potential) AB representative, you need to know more about me than what I am passionate about. The company I helped found (VitalSource) came into the W3C because of the unique merger event with the IDPF. This event was unique in the history of the W3C, and foretells a convergence of industries that we are helping to steer. Long before this merger, the team at VitalSource had been active in supporting, implementing, and deploying solutions based on the open web platform. While I was active in the IDPF before the merger, and had the privileged to serve on the board of directors, I have also been active in other standard bodies.
For the past 8 years, I have been active in the IMS Global community [2], serving on their board of directors for the past 4 years. IMS Global is a member driven, leadership directed, highly successful standards organization focusing on interoperability in the ed-tech community. In the just released annual report [3] you can see how successful they have been in growing their membership, and delivering working group driven standards, while maintaining financial stability and health. All of these are elements that we, the W3C community, want to be able to deliver as well.
If elected to the AB, my commitment to the W3C community is to apply what I have learned in the creation of my company, the involvement I have had with other organizations and standard bodies, and the work I have done in the W3C itself, to helping solve some of the issues facing us now, and in the future. If we are to measure our success on some key metrics we need to look at our membership growth, our financial health, and both the velocity and adoption of our deliverables.
Specifically my goals as your AB representative would be to broaden our membership within the publishing community with both the traditional, and non-traditional publishers by reaching out thru both VitalSource, and our parent company, Ingram, to the tens of thousands of publishers we work with to help them understand the value of W3C membership and involvement; to help apply some of the governance and processes I have learned in my working with other standards organizations to insure the health and stability of our finances; and to help drive visibility to the deliverables that our various working, interest, community, and business groups produce.
Above all, my ask of you, the AC group, is to vote. Evaluate the AB team as a whole, align the individuals with the goals of the W3C, examine the shared priorities of the AB [4] and give us the AB team we need to help us deliver on the promise, and the potential of the W3C.
Google is nominating Chris Wilson for re-election to the Advisory Board.
Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google, and has served two terms on the Advisory Board previously (2013-2017), helping improve the W3C's strategy in openness and agility, and charting the path for good standards production in the future. He's had a 24-year long career in the Web, from engineering the early NCSA Mosaic browser for Windows through a 15-year career at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer, to his current role at Google advocating for web developers. He's been involved with the W3C nearly since its inception; he was a founding member of the CSS Working Group, and has participated in (and chaired) a number of Working Groups and other efforts over the past couple of decades. His statement follows:
I've been fortunate to be elected to the W3C Advisory Board twice. During my previous terms, I've joined my colleagues in advocating for more openness, more open licensing, and making W3C work better with the web developer community, and I believe we've made great progress. For example, in order to make the web more agile for everyone, I helped create and currently co-chair the Web Incubation Community Group, which has helped rationalize developing standards.
My fundamental goals are to make the W3C more effective by making it easier to engage developers and vendors, and focus the W3C's resources to make more impactful standards. This is not a one-size-fits-all solution; but I believe we need to be more agile and effective. I believe that process and policies are required to do our best work - but they also need to be streamlined, and as much as possible, they should never stand in the way of exploring and shaping the future of the web.
If elected, I will continue to bring my pragmatic bent and practical experience working with (and helping evolve) a variety of standards organization models and processes to the Advisory Board, will continue to drive for maximizing the effectiveness of the W3C, and make the W3C process more usable for everyone.
China Mobile is pleased to nominate Zhang Yan for election to the Advisory Board. His personal statement follows:
I am the head of technology development division of the technology department in China Mobile. I am management of digital services research and development more than 10years.I have participated in the 3GPP, GSMA, OMA and other telecommunications industry standards international organizations.
China Mobile endeavors to contribute to the implementation of the "Internet+" action plan. By way of specialized operation and cultivation of innovation, we are making active expansion in the areas of mobile internet, cloud computing, big data and IoT. We have established multiple specialized business units, including MIGU, CM Internet and CM M2M, which focus on exploration in digital content and applications, and conduct customer-oriented, independent product research & development. We further consolidated the product lines including "and-Entertainment", "and-Communication" and "and-Life", and promoted centralized operation of products such as unified communication for corporate customers, IDC and internet television. We also introduced industry specified informatization products including "and-Education", "and-Health" and Internet of Vehicles, and commercially launched Mobile Cloud. At the same time, we have built the world's largest public IoT which has a terminal capacity of several billions.
If elected, I will be more from the perspective of telecom operators on the future of WEB technology requirement and recommendations. In especial I will focus on WEB technology for 5G, AI and the Internet of things and so on, to form a new development of WEB technology.