PUBLIC MARKS with search royalty

The slides could be improved by mentioning a few things more.

slide 19 – W3C didn’t pay for the logo work.

slide 21 – The WHATWG announces that they rename their document as HTML Living Standard. The snapshot which is published on W3C Web site under *patent policy* will be html5

slide 39 – The W3C has always said it was out for community review.

slide 56 – Things are cut from specs when there are not at least a double implementations of each features (Candidate Recommendation). It is the *normal* process. Nothing new. No aggressive timeline.

slide 69 – W3C here is W3C members. It illustrates a disagreement in between W3C members.

slide 82 – Microsoft is not joining the WHATWG because of the lack of patent policy. Nokia is not there, Access (NetFront) is not there, etc.

slide 93 – What are secret rules? The W3C Process is public, most of the WGs have their work in public. Specs are published in public.

slide 94 – Many working groups are open to public participation without fees. Example: HTMLWG.

slide 95 – False. There is a majority of Not For Profit and Affiliate companies.

slide 96 – False. By W3C Process, every member has one voice. W3C is a community of members. The listen is a bit strange.

slide

slide 98 – W3C members decided to move away from HTML brokeness and tried to move a cleaner markup leveraging on XML. We know it didn’t work and retrospectively it was a mistake.

slide 99 – False. The W3C moved from RAND (like IETF for example) to RF (Royalty Free) to give a safer environment for developers.

slide 102 – W3C said: “Be careful if you use the technology in production. There is no full interoperability yet”.

slide 107 – WHATWG people are exactly the same people that are working inside W3C Membership. Part of the work btw is done by the W3C webapps WG by the exact same people.

slide 125 – is spot on! ;) unfortunately.

Everyone who works on the Team says it's a privilege. It is, it really is. 50 or so ceaselessly interesting, engaging, smart

people, only a handful of whom actually work in the three host offices, somehow manage to work together and keep the Web

on track as a royalty-free, standards-based, interoperable system that works on everything from giant plasma screens to

mobile phones.

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

Video is an integral part of the modern web experience, which is why Mozilla has been working for the past few years to make sure that video can be used in the ways necessary to sustain the web’s incredible growth and generativity. Today we’re excited to join Google in announcing the WebM project to advance web video, including Google’s release of the VP8 codec under open source and royalty-free terms.