W3C Fact Sheet
October 2018

Membership, Staff

• 476 Members as of 9 October 2018 (was 472 in May 2018)
• 46.60 FTE, with a full-time or part-time staff of 60
  • New Staff (not including W3C Fellows):
    • Adam Powers joined the W3C Strategy team (August 2018)
      
    • Laura Flynn joined as Executive Assistant for W3C CEO and Global Business Development Lead (September 2018)
  • Staff left:
    • Liam Quin (July 2018)
    • Bill McCoy (July 2018)
    • Saori Sasaki (September 2018)
    • Sam Sugimoto (September 2018)
      
• W3C Fellows:
  • Jean-François Abramatic (Inria)
  • Eric Eggert (Knowbility, Inc.)
  • Sandro Hawke, Hawkeworks LLC (Strategy)
  • Ivan Herman, CWI (Architecture & Technology)
  • Tanya Mandal, Internet Academy (MarComm)

Technical Reports

166 Technical Reports were published between 8 May to 9 October 2018.

Recommendations

8 Recommendations (was 13 in May 2018)

1. WCAG 2.1
2. WebDriver
3. Canonical EXI
4. CSS Color Module Level 3
5. CSS3 UI
6. CSS Fonts Module Level 3
7. WAI-ARIA Graphics Module
8. Graphics Accessibility API Mappings

Other Types

• 7 Proposed Recommendations (was 17 May 2018)
• 39 Candidate Recommendations (was 31 May 2018)
• 99 Working Drafts (was 127 May 2018)
• 4 Group Notes (was 20 May 2018)

Strategy

Strategy Funnel tracks new activity. 

• 9 charters or re-charters approved (Strategy work concluded)
• 8 proposals in Evaluation and Chartering
• 16 work areas tracked in Incubation, many in active Community Groups
• 15 items in early Investigation
• 44 items in preliminary Exploration

Read more about the Strategy Funnel and contribute on GitHub.

Workshops

• W3C Workshop on Strong Authentication and Identity (10-11 December 2018, Redmond, USA)
• W3C Workshop on Permissions and User Consent(26-27 September 2018, San Diego, USA)
  Aligning evolutions of network and Web technologies.
• W3C Workshop on Digital Publication Layout and Presentation (from Manga to Magazines) (18-19 September 2018, Tokyo, Japan)

The Strategy Team is considering a number of workshops, on topics including: Strong Authentication and Identity; PWAs and Beyond: The Next Generation of Web Apps (Sakura); Web Standardization for Graph Data; Color on the Web; Advertising; Accessibility Guidelines Experience and Updates

Project

• 35 Working Groups
• 237 active specifications are tracked:
  • 196 aiming to become Recommendations
  • 9 documents are planned to advance to Candidate Recommendation in the next 4 months
  • 30 documents are planned to advance to Proposed Recommendation in the next 6 months
  • 34 have not been updated in the past 3 years
  • 76 were first published more than 5 years ago
  • Around 1,300 commits/month were made in the past 6 months in Working Group documents
• 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.
• The W3C Technical Reports index page has been revamped for easier access and usage. 12 Recommendations have been obsoleted/superseded.
• Resources:
  • 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.
  • The Next Step tool assists in finding the internal W3C Technical Report publication processes.
  • Automatic publication of Candidate Recommendation with substantive changes is now supported.
• Testing the Web: web-platform-tests (WPT) is an effort to build a cross-browser testsuite for the majority of the web platform
  • In the month of September 2018, the project merged 406 pull requests and received 98 new pull requests, involving 142 authors. 1,608 files have changed.
  • Initial support for remote control interface with its tutorial

Groups

W3C Community and Business Groups

• 319 groups (was 307 in May 2018)
• Over 10200 participants (there were over 9700 in May 2018)
• 271 Member organizations (there were 264 in May 2018)

Marketing & Communications

• Events:
  • W3C Developer Meeting, as part of TPAC 2018
  • Paris Web 2018 (October) featured 3 W3C speakers: r12a, Dom, Bert
  • Wendy Seltzer talked about advertising at the NAB Show NY in October
  • J. Alan Bird participated in Financial Innovation and Payments Summit, Newport USA in July
  • Jeff Jaffe keynoted at the M-Enabling Summit, Washington USA in June
  • Ted Guild participated in TU-Automotive Detroit in June
  • Ian Jacobs was in a panel at the Payments Canada Summit in May
  • Ivan Herman spoke at the Digital Publishing Summit Europe in May
• Diversity at W3C; Launch of TPAC Diversity Scholarship
  
• 2 press releases
  1. W3C Issues Improved Accessibility Guidance for Websites and Applications
     
  2. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launches Internationalization Initiative
     
• 28 W3C Blog posts
• 21 Talks
• Weekly digest of W3C news and trends
• Social Media: Twitter, LinkedIn
• Weekly Public Newsletters
• AB election, TAG election
  

Systems

• Improvements to our GitHub backup script to scope with large repositories and cover repositories hosted outside of the w3c GitHub organization
• New documentation: GitHub Best practices and recommended tools
• Added support for automatic publication of Candidate Recommendations with Echidna
• Deployed new tool to manage W3C in the Press articles
• Implemented Invited Expert Fund support option on TPAC 2018 payment page

Online training

• The W3Cx MOOC training program started in June 2015.
• Nearly 770K enrollees all over the world (all countries represented).
  
• Excellent feedback from the students wrt the courses' quality (and how they help get a job).
• W3Cx launched a "Front-End Web Developer" (FEWD) professional certificate program (in April 2017) The program consists of a suite of five W3Cx courses on the three foundational languages that power the Web: HTML5, CSS and JavaScript.
  • Strong partnership with Microsoft: 3 of our courses are part of Microsoft's Front-End Web Developement professional program
  • JavaScript Introduction was developed in partnership with University Côte d'Azur

Liaisons

W3C is involved in liaisons and coordination with numerous organizations and SDOs to:

• avoid duplication of work and coordinate our respective agenda
• mitigate different milestones timing, different confidentiality rules, different IPR, different vision of the Web;
• make sure standards are interoperable;
• ensure that our standards work is officially recognized by governments
  
• ensure the global set of Web and Internet standards form a compatible stack of technologies, at the technical and policy level (patent regime, fragmentation, use in policy making);
• promote Standards adoption equally by the industry, the public sector, and the public at large --W3C is a co-signatory of OpenStand. IEEE, IETF and W3C, pillars of Internet/Web standards, joined to create a new paradigm for standards.

Ongoing/Upcoming work:

• We have ARO/PAS status with ISO;
  • WAI WCAG 2 became ISO/IEC 40500 and EN 301549.
  • MathML became ISO/IEC 40314 (for Pi).
  • Reaffirmation of our ISO/IEC JTC1 Publicly Available Specification submitter status to, til 2022.
• W3C participates in the ICANN Technical Experts Group and also in the Auction benefits CCWG.
• We're participating in the EU MSP and Rolling Plan on Standardization.
• We're tracking incoming and outgoing official liaisons in a Member-visible archive.
• In 2018, active coordination with the European Commission and the ESOs (European Standardization Organizations, ETSI/CEN/CENElec) led to the parallel development of WCAG 2.1 and the update to the EN 301 549 on Accessibility for mobile.
• Several new liaisons with vertical fora in areas such as Payments, Media, WoT, etc;