What is the Future of W3C?

Continuing the discussion begun in the [What is the Future of W3C? breakout at TPAC 2019

This breakout attempted to understand the level of consensus or divergence in the community on several topics:

Mission – W3C’s traditional mission statement is “lead the web to its full potential”. Does the community believe W3C’s basic value proposition need updating, perhaps to focus on some combination of documenting how the web actually works, certifying which products comply with the consensus standards, and focusing on the most pressing challenges to the original vision?

Leadership – The founding Director is no longer involved with W3C’s day to day operations, but the “Director” has a key role in the process and governance. Would the community be more comfortable with finding another neutral person with considerable expertise who can commit the time to being Director, or delegating tasks such as adjudicating formal objections to some sort of elected council?

Staffing – What role or roles should the Team prioritize and focus on? Mechanics of consensus building, or technical guidance on solutions?

Breakout Discussion

This section summarizes the ideas that came out in the session, it doesn't identify the people expressing them.

Overall Structure

This topic emerged from the discussion, it wasn't part of the original agenda: Should W3C continue as a dues-heavy, staff-heavy organization or move to something more like the IETF (which has no membership or dues, outsources administrative functions, and relies on selected volunteers rather than a paid staff to manage the community and facilitate technical consensus)?

Pros:

The dues fund W3C's infrastructure and team services, tooling support, human support ...
The member dues subsidize TPAC
The membership concept is at the center of the patent policy. [This was controversial]
Paying the team from the member dues helps ensure the team is neutral, and vendor neutrality is a big part of W3C's value proposition

Cons:

Little transparency to members on how dues are spent by the team
Invited Expert model is cumbersome for non-members the community needs in standards work
Membership model creates incentives for Members not completely aligned with what is best for the future of the web
Requires paying money to get a vote
Budget of IETF overall is less than W3C, although work done is much larger

Neutral:

W3C could explore new sources of revenue to reduce dues, e.g. product certification
The transition to being a legal entity is not a "done deal", BUT there is some level of consensus among the hosts on the current plan, and it would be difficult to re-negotiate. It took 4 years to get to the current level of agreement, starting over could require another four years to get a different agreement.

Mission

Perhaps we proposers didn't frame this well enough, because we weren't interested in the mission statement so much as the W3C's community's real sense of purpose and how we know when we've succeeded or failed at achieving it.

Some points that came out in the discussion:

There doesn't seem to be a clear understanding among the team, AB, and long-time participants as to what W3C is all about, but we need a clear and concrete description of the mission when we reach out to prospective sponsors.
W3C's real role might be better defined as "shepherding" the community to improve the web, not "leading" it.
Our strategy should be about being a good venue for people, companies, and organizations to collaborate, not picking technologies.
Before changing W3C's structure, we need to figure out what we collectively want W3C to be.
W3C shouldn't try to pick the technical direction of the web; its job is to provide the best possible venue for the community -- including other standards organizations and open source projects -- to build consensus on strategy and tactics to improve the web.
We don't want W3C to be a generic venue for collaboration (such as OASIS), we want it to be a venue with a shared mission, shared values, and a focus on the web.

Leadership

Maybe we should look harder for a "luminary" to replace TimBL, instead of a committee ... especially when we are asking for sponsorships
Or maybe not: we don't need a luminary/sage, members join because they want to be involved
We need to think about succession planning for the current generation of top leadership, not just Tim, since several key roles are filled by people nearing retirement age.

Staffing

It costs participants just as much to participate in IETF as W3C, considering that the "volunteers" are employees do get paid to perform the functions the W3C employs staff to do.
one role of the Team is to "annoy" the membership, (e.g. by requiring horizontal reviews by neutral experts)
Overheard then minuted: "trust Team to be neutral on issues, less so on chartering." [Perhaps this is because the Team has a vested interest in bringing in new members to pay their salaries, and chartering new work is part of the member recruitment process.]

Possible Points of Consensus

Mission

Perhaps "stewardship" is a better description than "leadership" to describe W3C's role in the web community. By analogy to environmental stewardship, we identify problems and seek consensus on how to solve them, build communities to collaborate on implementing the solutions, the so on how to solve them, and continuously monitor to ensure the problems are mitigated. Stewardship" is an inherently inclusive concept; we can work together to make the web better, respecting each others different areas of expertise and ability to contribute. "Leadership" by contrast is intrinsically divisive: If one is leading, others are either following, leaving, or plotting how to become the leader.

There's no need to change the mission statement to "Stewarding the web to its full potential" or whatever, but internalizing the stewardship mission should help bring the community together.

Leadership

It's clear that the host model is broken for today's web, but there seemed to be consensus that the team + AB moving in the right direction.

There seems to be rough consensus that no single "faction" [need better word] should control W3C ... not the browser developers, not the academics, not the team, not the host universities.

Staffing

Engage the community in discussing how W3C could have the same or larger impact without needing $10 million per year. Is there a viable middle ground between the IETF and W3C model of staffing?

Ways Forward

Suggestions:

Form a CG to explore these inter-related questions about mission and structure
To the extent that community wants the AB to take up discussion, the AB will arrange priorities for next year in November; reach out to AB members if you want them to make this a priority.