W3C Fact Sheet
November 2017

Membership, Staff

• 464 Members as of 31 October 2017 (was 461 in April 2017)
• 50,5 FTE, with a full-time or part-time staff of 67 (was 68 in April 2017).
  • New Staff (not including W3C Fellows):
    • Zhenjie Li joined the Administration team at W3C/Beihang (May 2017)
    • Fuqiao Xue joined the Project Management team at W3C/Beihang (July 2017)
    • Ruoxi Ran joined the Project Management / Web Accessibility Specialist teams at W3C/Beihang (August 2017)
    • Sean McCreery joined as Executive Assistant for W3C CEO (August 2017)
  • Staff left:
    • Olive Xu (April 2017)
    • Andrei Sambra (April 2017)
    • Felix Sasaki (April 2017)
    • Phil Archer (June 2017)
    • Yan Wang (July 2017)
    • Yingying Chen (August 2017)
• W3C Fellows:
  • Tanya Mandal, Internet Academy (December 2016, MarComm)
  • Ivan Herman, CWI (January 2017, Architecture & Technology)

Technical Reports

285 Technical Reports were published between 26 April 2017 to 21 October 2017.

Recommendations: 10 (was 19 in April 2017)

• Linked Data Notifications
• Activity Streams 2.0
• Activity Vocabulary
• Micropub
• XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0
• Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL)
• Encrypted Media Extensions
• HTML 5.1 2nd Edition
• Time Ontology in OWL
• Semantic Sensor Network Ontology

Other Types

• 7 Proposed Recommendations
• 32 Candidate Recommendations
• 217 Working Drafts
• 20 Group Notes

Workshops

• W3C Workshop on WebVR Authoring: Opportunities and Challenges: To bring together WebVR stakeholders to identify unexploited opportunities as well as technical gaps in WebVR authoring.

Groups

Closed Working and Interest Groups: 3

• TV Control Working Group
• Geolocatiobn Working Group
• Digital Publishing Interest Group

W3C Community and Business Groups

• 291 groups (was 281 in April 2017)
• Over 8986 participants (we had nearly 8400 in April 2017)
• Nearly 260 Member organizations (was 265 in April 2017)
• Nearly 4620 non-Member organizations (was over 2800 in April 2017)

Strategy

Strategy Funnel initiated to track new activity. 

• 12 charters or re-charters approved (Strategy work concluded)
• 5 proposals in Evaluation and Chartering
• 15 work areas tracked in Incubation, many in active Community Groups
• 15 items in early Investigation
• 41 items in preliminary Exploration
• Proposed the charter of a Web & Virtual Reality WG which was concluded after Advisory Committee Review that the work needed further incubation and scoping before a WG should be formed. A Web and Virtual Authoring Workshop will be held in December 2017.
  

Read more about the Strategy Funnel and contribute on GitHub.

Project

• 36 Working Groups
  • New Working Groups:
    • Web Assembly, chaired by Bradley Nelson (Google)
    • Service Workers, chaired by Jake Archibald (Google) and Jatinder Mann (Microsoft)
  • Working Groups extended for Recommendation maintenance: HTML Media Extensions, RDF Data Shapes, XML Query, XSLT, Spatial Data on the Web. The expectation is to close those Groups once Process 2018 gets adopted.
• 2 Working Group are outside their charter periods:
  • Web Fonts: waiting on their transition to Proposed Recommendation
  • Browser Testing and Tools: waiting to finalize their implementation report to resubmit their Proposed Recommendation transition
• 235 active specifications are tracked:
  • 200 aiming for Recommendation
  • ~40 documents are intended to become Proposed Recommendations in the next 6 months
  • 30 have not been updated in the past 3 years
  • 57 were first published more than 5 years ago
• W3C now automatically flags previous dated versions of technical reports as outdated, to ensure readers are aware of the fact that a newer version was published. We're also working to ensure that search engines point to the canonical version of documents.
• Resources:
  • The W3C Guide, resource for chairs and team contacts, is getting refreshed
  • We're now providing a milestones tool, to help Chairs and Team Contacts to avoid Process and Publication Moratorium delays
  • The transition requirements have been updated to keep up with the Process changes
• Testing the Web: web-platform-tests (WPT) is an effort to build a cross-browser testsuite for the majority of the web platform
  • web-platform-tests dashboard tracks implementations on a daily basis (contributed by Google)
  • The charter template was updated to promote interoperability, where all changes made to specifications should have tests.
  • Work on getting Working Groups to promote tests along with changes to specifications is ongoing.

Global Participation

• Member participation status monitoring system development: an Alpha version of a member participation dashboard, for W3C Team use, is running on a local server hosted by W3C China Host; the dashboard shows the global participation status from different angles, e.g. by country/region, member, topic, group, time, user, etc. Both W3C public mailing lists and github data have been retrieved and analyzed in this system. More functions will be added as the system develops. This dashboard and the statistics it provides is used by the W3C team for its efforts to improve member participation.
• Selected best practices from 4 hosts and W3C Offices have been shared cross W3C team. On-boarding process for new AC reps has started to be implemented.
• A translation strategy has been reviewed and approved by W3M as a way to enhance the participation from non-English speaking countries.
• Starting with TPAC2017, a Welcome Package for new W3C event participants with necessary info has been suggested to help new participants.

Marketing & Communications

• Events:
  • Manned a booth and hosted a panel discussion at PayExpo Eruope 2017, London, England on 5 October 2017
  • Presented a panel discussion at Money20/20, Las Vegas, USA, 23-25 October 2017
  • A dozen interviews of W3C key people (on topics such as HTML, EME, WAI, WebRTC, etc.)
• 6 W3C Press Releases (habitually translated into several languages by W3C Offices)
• Conducted an analysis of W3C and EME in the Media.
• 17 talks
• 24 W3C Blog posts
• Weekly digest of W3C news and trends
• Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Weekly Public Newsletters
• 5 new Member Testimonials
• Prepared a Welcome Package with necessary info to help new participants, distributed starting with TPAC2017.
• Collaborated even more closely with W3C Business Development to streamline workflows and foster impactful actions.
• Organized a special AB election.
• Exploring new Communications medium: AMA sessions, Video.

Systems

• WBS redesign to be deployed after TPAC
• Released an etherpad instance for collabotative editing by the W3C Community
• Continued enhancements to the Automated Publication Workflow System to facilitate publishing from Bikeshed and CSS Working Group workflow.
• Retired former Pubrules system in favor of its successor, Specberus.
• Replaced the Talks system.
• Deployed W3C/Github account integration.

Legal

Updated the Patent Policy with errata to reflect Process 2017 terminology

• Patent Policy 5 February 2004 (updated 1 August 2017)
• Patent Policy FAQ updated

Industry, Liaisons, Online training

Read about those in-depth in the W3C Strategic Highlights.