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What should be the new mission of W3C?
3. Posted by karl
on Tuesday 2010-06-15 at 17:58:27 PST
Many of your questions are contained in this unique sentence "How will they fulfill this commitment?"
The W3C was modeled at a time where it made sense to create a consortium (inspired from what X Consortium did). W3C has been started in October 1994. It started "with support from DARPA and the European Commission." [1] Then to be able to be independent, got enough paid Members for moving the work forward. The organization never charged for the specifications and pushed very hard to create the Royalty Free license for Web standards. The RF policy has been a tough fight in between different categories of W3C Members (and Web community included). W3C lost Members in this decision (which was good for the Web). Losing Members mean losing money.
It's why I come back to your question. "How will they fulfill this commitment?"
Basically, you can narrow the question to "Does W3C need permanent staff and infrastructure to achieve the work?" The W3C gets money from Members and grants which help finance some activities or some areas of work.
The money is used to pay the People working at W3C. [2] Some of these people are not even paid by W3C. The W3C is not rich[3], quite the opposite and it is sometimes difficult to reconcile different objectives. Many times, people have suggested to raise funds through campaigns to be able to pay People on something specific issues. For example, W3C tried to raise money for the validators through donations[4]. It doesn't work to the point to be able to pay the salary of an engineer for it.
The W3C staff includes people for servers, communications, administration and technical staff in charge of keeping the W3C Process on tracks. It is not very rewarding as a job. A lot of issues to deal with, and being the target for attacks by proxy. If something is wrong, this is W3C's fault. I often compared the W3C staff as UN peace keepers. No right to shoot, and in any circumstances trying to accommodate all point of views.
So basically, the question you have to answer are how to organize the manpower and the infrastructure in a way that will make possible to work in trust and peacefully. It is not easy to find the right *concrete* model which will actually work.
For example, some people ask for more documentation, tutorials. Some people require lively Web services such as the validators and others [5]. Managing a big group under the patent policy such as HTML WG is a daunting task. Having enough time to deal with issues and animating discussions is also difficult when not enough resources. More resources mean more money.
Where does W3C get the money? Or How do we change the infrastructure so W3C can work with the money? This is the real question to answer.
[1]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/facts.html#history
[2]: http://www.w3.org/People/
[3]: http://www.la-grange.net/2008/12/12/w3c-budget
[4]: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/Donate
[5]: http://www.w3.org/Status















