Form for W3C Advisory Committee to vote (W3C Member-only) | TAG home
This is the list of nominees for the 2022 election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Each person has been nominated by at least one W3C Member according to the TAG election process.
Note: The deadline for votes is 04:59 UTC on 2022-12-14 (23:59, Boston time on 2022-12-13).
The following nominations have been made (listed in random order):
An asterisk (*) indicates that the nominee is a current participant. All individuals were nominated by the AC Representatives of their organizations unless otherwise indicated below.
The following nomination statements have been made (listed in random order):
Brandon is currently the co-founder and CTO of Koodos Labs, where he’s pioneering work on the Mediagraph — an open linked database for internet media and core infrastructure for portable interest graphs. He spent his early career at MIT’s CSAIL and Facebook working on web infrastructure. As a Hispanic first-generation engineer, he spends his spare time encouraging and mentoring younger engineers.
Apple is pleased to nominate Theresa O’Connor for re-election to the TAG. In her own words:
Hi, I’m Tess. My pronouns are she/her. 你好！我叫康特蘇。はじめまして、オコーナーです。
I’m the AC rep for Apple, where I manage our Web Standards & Interoperability team. I’ve been doing standards work for almost twenty years and I’ve had the honor of serving on the TAG since 2018.
Over the last several years much of my professional focus has been on privacy. For the TAG I co-edit the Security and Privacy Questionnaire and serve on the Web Privacy Principles Task Force, which is tasked with documenting privacy principles for the Web. I’m also a co-chair of the Privacy Community Group, a CG with over 500 participants from over 150 organizations. Defending and improving Web privacy requires diligent work within each of our community and working groups, as well as vigilance in horizontal review from both PING and the TAG. I’m committed to using my time on the TAG to productively advance the cause of user privacy on the Web.
Design reviews are the lifeblood of the TAG and what we spend the vast majority of our time on. We endeavour to help anybody who asks us for advice on how best to fit their work into the rest of the Web platform, and we try to capture any lessons we learn along the way in the Web Platform Design Principles document. I’ve been involved in many reviews during my time on the TAG and I’m very proud of all the work we’ve put into them. There are a number of ways I think we could improve the consistency, thoroughness, and timeliness of our reviews. The TAG is a small committee spread across many time zones; I’d like to improve our ability to make progress on reviews asynchronously, to help each of us better fit our TAG responsibilities into our complex and varied schedules.
Speaking of which, the responsibilities of TAG participants are increasing due to Process changes taking place in anticipation of TimBL’s retirement. The TAG now spends a significant amount of time serving on W3C Councils to decide Formal Objections, and we’re also being asked to review upcoming charters. These additional responsibilities demand a somewhat different distribution of skills: a proven track record of diplomacy is essential; we need to be able to find consensus in a room despite strong personalities and intensely-held positions. Please keep this in mind as you cast your vote.
The TAG is currently more diverse than ever. But, as always, we can and must do more. This election, I hope the AC continues to prioritize seating a TAG of diverse backgrounds, identities, and lived experience.
Thank you for your consideration.
This statement is available on the Web at https://tess.oconnor.cx/2022/11/TAG
Mozilla is pleased to nominate Distinguished Engineer Martin Thomson for the TAG.
Martin is a well established expert on networking, with contributions to specifications and implementations of HTTP, TLS, WebPush, WebRTC, and most recently QUIC. From this formal and practical experience, he has acquired significant expertise in the areas of privacy and security. Martin is strongly interested in ensuring that people can avoid having their online experience get out of their control, especially in ways that they can’t understand.
Martin’s contributions include:
Martin also served on the Internet Architecture Board between 2016 and 2020. While on the IAB he was responsible for the IAB’s privsec (“privacy and security”) program.
With this extensive background in internet and web technologies, Martin is particularly interested in promoting a set of technology design principles on the TAG, such as safety, user agency, and openness. The Web is a unique system that continues to change, but how it changes is guided by the people that collaboratively build the web. That collaboration requires cooperation and a system of shared principles, driven and guided by the TAG.
We believe Martin’s experience, skill set, and track record are both an excellent general fit for the TAG, and in particular bring critical expertise in networking, privacy, and security. Please join us in supporting Martin Thomson for the TAG.
Mr.XU is a veteran in TMT domain with 20+ years experiences. He's leading technical architecture department in web-based solutions covering AI, cloud computing, UHD audiovisual production in media and gaming sections. As the technical director, he managed the Web and mobile platform for FIFA World Cup/Olympics Games with peak traffic by 200M access per day, and clouding gaming platform by 110M MAU. As the Rights Holding Broadcaster, the web-based production and distribution platform works with hundreds of media studios. He's one of the famous and active leaders in WebRTC/Web3/IoT/Web Publishing developer communities in China and Asia, serving the web vendors, content providers and technology developers with the operator/coordinator role.
XU is actively engaged in ITU, 3GPP and regional standardization and regulation bodies. He's co-chairing WNIG and participating MEIG and Realtime CG of W3C.
Digital Bazaar is pleased to nominate Amy Guy for the W3C Technical Architecture Group. As Digital Bazaar's Advisory Committee representative, I have always known Amy to be a force for good in all the endeavors in which they participate. They have always fought for the good of the Web and the people that use it and is one of the most humble and helpful people that I know. Amy has done good work during their last two years on the W3C TAG and I look forward to what they are able to accomplish for each of us, and all of the people of the Web, over the next two years.
I grew up alongside the Web, and have never known the world without it. Early tinkering with HTML and CSS shaped the course of my life and became a formative part of how I interacted with the world. It is deeply important to me to see the Web move forward as a positive force, and to push back against the surveillance, manipulation, and abuse that are routine across many parts of the Web today.
The TAG has a great record over recent years of promoting security, privacy, and accessibility as core parts of Web architecture. I have spent my efforts during my two years as a member of the TAG pushing to go above and beyond these foundations; as a member of the TAG's Privacy Task Force, as well as editor of the draft Societal Impacts Questionnaire. I intend to continue enabling and encouraging specification authors and implementers to consider the broader consequences of their work in the context of a global web which is part of an enormous and ever-changing landscape of cultural norms, legislation, and innovation.
I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, with a visiting year at MIT. My thesis builds on my personal experiences with online communities; I researched self-expression on the Web and how interconnected social and technical systems support or impede online interactions. At the same time, I helped shape the future of the social Web through co-editing and implementing several specifications of the W3C Social Web Working Group, including the ActivityPub specification which has seen recent attention due to a surge in public interest in decentralised social networks. I also spent a year and a half as the Working Group's Team Contact, which familiarised me with W3C processes and politics.
I spent the years since developing software to support openness and transparency for public good. I have worked with investigative journalists and open data activists, facilitating the efforts of civil society groups, governments, and the private sector internationally. I continue this work as a Director of Open Data Services Co-operative, building and maintaining tools that use the Web to promote civic use of data and fight corruption worldwide. I also work with Digital Bazaar on Web standards related to decentralisation, with the goal of enabling a foundational layer of technologies to support individual agency on the Web.
These experiences at the intersection of civic work and cutting edge standards development give me a unique perspective for my time on the TAG. There is no need for trade-offs between participation and privacy, or between community and autonomy, when building empowering Web technologies. My strengths lie in listening to input from a range of perspectives, discerning the common grounds on which to move forwards, and turning consensus into concrete specification text.
Should my term be renewed, I will continue to advocate for thoughtful and intentional design of web platform features which account for diverse perspectives and usage scenarios, as well as bringing this mindset to specification design reviews.
Find me at https://rhiaro.co.uk/
I would very much like the opportunity to re-join the TAG, after serving for one term in 2019-2020.
At that time, I chose not to run again in order to take a long needed break from work, during which I also decided to leave my job at Google. I will be starting a new role at Igalia in November, where I will be once again joining a team to take on work relating to the intersection of web standards and accessibility.
I believe that my previous time on the TAG was valuable, and I hope to join this team once again to support the many individuals contributing to the future of web standards. If elected, I would especially like to continue to work towards embedding accessibility in TAG processes and design guidance.
During my previous term on the TAG, like all TAG members I contributed to numerous [design reviews]. I brought my particular perspective from my experience having worked on the design and implementation of web standards, as well as related US and OS-level features, to improve the state of accessibility on the web since 2011.
I also undertook work to make the [Web Platform Design Principles] document more consistent, readable and accessible to a more diverse audience. This included significant [editing] of the Design Principles documents, and the creation of a (very) basic [TAG style guide].
Apart from these core duties, I also successfully advocated for ensuring that the TAG meeting schedule be adjusted to add more time for regular collaboration on design reviews outside the weekly plenary meeting time, and to ensure we were setting aside time to do work other than working through individual design reviews. This meant that the TAG could get through more of our backlog of design reviews, as well as ensuring that the insights gathered from the review process could be considered and documented as institutional knowledge.
During my time on the Chrome Accessibility team, I learned a great deal and was able to work on a large number of projects of which I’m still proud, including:
My new team at Igalia have been supportive in re-nominating me for TAG, and I hope to have the opportunity to bring the additional perspective of working with a smaller organisation so deeply embedded in web standards work.
I’m Lea, and I’m running for re-election to the TAG to continue applying my usability research, CSS WG, and TAG experience to help W3C stay connected to the developer community, and to better serve their needs by ensuring web platform features are not only powerful, but also learnable and approachable, with a smooth ease-of-use to complexity curve.
I wear many hats. My background spans almost two decades of web design & development experience, one decade of standards work in the CSS WG, nearly a decade of PhD level human-computer interaction research & teaching at MIT, and over a decade of educating web developers through talks, books, articles, and helping them through my dozens of open source projects, some of which are used on millions of websites. For those unfamiliar with my background, I encourage taking a look at my 2020 candidate statement.
In 2020, I had the great honor of being elected to serve on the TAG by the W3C membership. In the two years I have served on the TAG, I participated in over 70 design reviews and helped prioritize API design in our reviewing. I have been publicly praised for the quality of design reviews I led.
It is important that the TAG does not operate in a vacuum: The primary purpose of our work is to serve developers and end-users by ensuring web platform features are usable, secure and privacy preserving. I have used my experience during design reviews to make sure we remain connected to this mission.
Together with Sangwhan Moon, I took the lead on our Web Platform Design Principles effort, which documents the principles that underlie Web Platform features — previously only existing in WG lore. The Web Platform is going through an explosion of new features; only in the last year the TAG received almost a hundred design review requests. With this volume, it is important that reviews are consistent, transparent, and fast. Evolving our published design principles helps with all three goals.
The Web ecosystem is not just the Web Platform itself, but also the various tools and libraries out there. I started a project to publish a subset of the design principles that apply to web developers, to help them in creating Web Platform compatible APIs. After all, with web components, web developers are now HTML designers, with Houdini APIs, they are now CSS designers, and with JS, they’ve been JS API designers since forever. The project is currently in its infancy, and If elected, it will be one of my tasks to get it published within my next term.
As a Greek woman, I bring both a Mediterranean and European perspective that diversifies the TAG and as a fully bilingual Greek and English speaker, I can fully participate in rapid technical discussions while also having an appreciation of the Internationalization needs of those who use the Web in languages other than English.
To ensure my participation has been beneficial for the TAG, I reached out to the chairs for feedback before deciding to run again. Both were very positive and strongly encouraged me to run again.
As someone not employed at a big tech company, I am not influenced by any particular company line. My only agenda is to lead the Web Platform to its full potential, and if re-elected, I’m willing to commit to spending the requisite hundreds of hours working towards that goal over the next two years. This was just the beginning, there is so much more important work to be done!
I would like to thank Open JS Foundation for graciously funding my TAG-related travel, in the event that I am re-elected, and both OpenJS Foundation and Bocoup for funding it during my first term.
This statement is also published at lea.verou.me/2022/11/tag-2