These are the CEO Overview slides for W3C's Advisory Committee Meeting at TPAC 2022.

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CEO Overview

“W3C Strategy: past, present, and future”

Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO

September 2022

Code of conduct

five people of various ethnicities in front of a laptop

This meeting operates under CEPC.

As do all of our interactions within the W3C Community.

This is part of our goal to improve inclusion at W3C.

"We all share responsibility for our work environment."

W3C Anti-trust policy

W3C is dedicated to the development of technical specifications and best practices for interoperability. W3C does not play any role in the competitive decisions of W3C participants nor in any way restrict competition. W3C's policy is that its activities are conducted to the highest ethical standards and in compliance with all applicable antitrust and competition laws and regulations. The W3C Process is designed to support open and fair deliberations leading to consensus-based decisions and to assure that Web standards produced by that Process can be implemented on a royalty-free basis.

Participants develop competing technologies, products, and services. Participants must ensure that their conduct does not violate antitrust and competition laws and regulations. For example, participants should not discuss product pricing, methods or channels of product distribution, division of markets, allocation of customers, or any other topic that should not be discussed among competitors. It is each participant’s responsibility to obtain appropriate legal counsel regarding their conduct in W3C and to comply with applicable antitrust or competition laws and regulations.

Antitrust and Competition Guidance

What is strategy?

word cloud in the shape of a pie chart showing some significant keywords around the notion of strategy

Strategy
elements:
2011

A year after I joined as W3C CEO,
I described in one of my first AC
Meetings four strategic elements:

venn diagram showing strategy at the intersection of: the right topics, communications, business development, outreach to stakehilders

Strategy elements: 2012

collage of 16 screenshots of the participation slide in the CEO slides from 2012 to 2019

Strategy elements:
2020

table displaying the changes in focus of the team contact acitivities between 2010 and 2020: Core Web 45% down to 14%, Incubation .4% up to 10%, Industry focus from 8% to 17%, Societal needs from 21% to 33%, Global reach from 3% to 9% and Tooling from 23% down to 18%

One way to truly
appreciate a strategy
is to see how the
resources are assigned

Evolution to meet
Member needs

Last major strategy taskforce

Sustainable Business Model Core Place for Standards User Global & Accessible
  • Jérôme Chailloux
  • Don Deutsch
  • Marie-Claire Forgue
  • Daniel Glazman
  • Rotan Hanrahan
  • Masao Isshiki
  • Jeff Jaffe
  • Karen Myers
  • Thomas Roessler
  • Ralph Swick
  • Jean-François Abramatic
  • Tim Berners-Lee
  • Daniel Dardailler
  • Philippe Le Hégaret
  • Ora Lassila
  • Ashok Malhotra
  • Dave Raggett
  • Thomas Roessler
  • Sam Ruby
  • Doug Schepers
  • Mike Smith
  • Dan Appelquist
  • Art Barstow
  • Carl Cargill
  • Tantek Çelik
  • Michael Champion
  • Karl Dubost
  • Eduardo Gutentag
  • Harry Halpin
  • Rotan Hanrahan
  • Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
  • Ian Jacobs
  • Arnaud Le Hors
  • Charles McCathieNeville
  • Chris Messina
  • Thomas Roessler
  • Lawrence Rosen
  • Yesha Sivan
  • Olivier Thereaux
  • Andy Updegrove
  • Ann Bassetti
  • Roger Cutler
  • Alan Doniger
  • Bob Freund
  • Rotan Hanrahan
  • Mark Nottingham
  • Steven Pemberton
  • Kai Scheppe
  • Ralph Swick
  • Andy Updegrove
  • Steve Zilles
  • Jim Bell
  • Klaus Birkenbihl
  • Stéphane Boyera
  • Judy Brewer
  • Somnath Chandra
  • Daniel Dardailler
  • Vagner Diniz
  • Eduardo Gutentag
  • Richard Ishida
  • Angel Li
  • Swaran Lata
  • Takeshi Natsuno

Key strategy elements

  1. Participation

    Global
    Community building
    Member growth
    Diversity & inclusion
     
  2. Full potential of the Web

    Innovation & Incubation
    Large, dynamic forum
    Societal needs
    W3C Process agility
  3. Member value

    Industry needs
    Partnering with
    other organizations
    Leadership

Global. e.g., China

Strategic goal:
Strong W3C presence, everywhere.

Image: world map

One Web community

Recruitment

Web interoperability

Enormously active Chinese Web IG.
Focus on understanding & bridging.

Important Chinese brands joined.
40+ Chinese Members, including 9 Full.

Hundreds of millions of MiniApps users
Standards ideas applied to other hybrid apps.

Global. e.g., Japan, elsewhere

Strategic goal:
Strong W3C presence, everywhere.

Image: world map

Community

Regional needs

This, elsewhere

Comparatively, Japan has the most tight-knit partnership between Members and Team.

Handling of needs in: publishing, telecommunications, script support.

W3C Chapters in Latin America, the Persian Gulf, Australia, Southeast Asia, etc.

Community

screenshot of the dashboard which summarizes the level of activity from current Community Groups: number of mails, repositories, new participants, related groups, staff members participation

Strategic goal:
W3C pre-eminence for web standards making

Incubation & innovation

Tight cycle of innovation and adoption which helps us rapidly evolve our technology base.

Community Groups # of participants Groups that are fed
WebAssembly 1,451 WebAssembly
Web Platform Incubator 885 WebApps, HTML (WHATWG), WebPerf, …
Credentials 492 DID, Verifiable Claims
Privacy 479 TAG, many other groups
Immersive Web 300 Immersive Web
GPU on the Web 267 Web GPU
Web Machine Learning 120 Web Machine Learning
Publishing 99 EPUB3 and related Publishing@W3C groups
W3C Process 46 W3C Advisory Board

Addressing societal needs

Member growth

line chart of growth of W3C Membership 1994 Q3 - 2022 Q3

Serving industry needs

timeline showing focus areas and a table matching industry ecosystems and champions

Partnerships

We have over 100 liaisons, simple or deep, to maximize our leverage, because the web technology stack touches the technologies of many organizations. Here are a selected few:

ISOupstream our work as ISO publicly available standards
WHATWG2 MoUs to work on HTML, DOM, Fetch, and other specs
IETFsecurity, privacy, IoT, WebRTC, and many other areas
IDPFpublishing on the web; until 2016 merger
EMVCopayments
COVESAautomotive
CTAmedia & entertainment
OGCgeospatial

Process agility

It is essential that part of our strategic focus be on continuous improvements in how we make standards. Recent key enhancements of the W3C Process:

2014Removed last call step
2015Enshrined Horizontal Review
2017STV voting
2018CEPC added by reference
2019Community Groups and Business Groups added by reference
2020Living Standards adoption and Patent Policy update
2021Registries, W3C Statements Track (including for the AB and TAG)

Member value

W3C has held the line on Member dues increases these last fourteen years:

Member class 2008 2022 % change 2022 in 2008 prices % change
$1B or more $68,500 $77,000 12% $51,000 -26%
$500M-$1B $68,500 $68,500 0 $46,000 -33%
$50M-$500M $68,500 $25,000 -63% $17,000 -75%
$3M-$50M; non-profits $7,900 $7,900 0 $5,300 -33%
0-3M (startups) $7,900 $2,250 -72% $1,500 -81%

Diversity and Inclusion

Premise: Since the web serves the planet – that means that our community must look like the planet. But it doesn’t.

Efforts to date

How can we together make even more of a difference?

How do we cover so many strategic elements?

Stacked bar chart displaying the data about changes in staffing levels as shown in the previous slide

W3C's future strategy

I’d like us to start strategizing now.
Is our current strategy the right one for the future?

  1. Participation

    Global
    Community building
    Member growth
    Diversity & inclusion
     
  2. Full potential of the Web

    Innovation & Incubation
    Large, dynamic forum
    Societal needs
    W3C Process agility
  3. Member value

    Industry needs
    Partnering with
    other organizations
    Leadership

How do we deal with newer issues such as sustainability, misinformation, and outreach to a wider set of web stakeholders?

Thank you!

I am looking forward to your participation - in person or remotely - at TPAC!

Please, send questions and comment by e-mail:
jeff@w3.org or w3c-ac-forum@w3.org.