Florian’s Blog

It’s that time of the year again: the W3C is running the annual election cycle to renew about half of its Advisory Board, which I have the privilege to serve on for a two-year term as a result of last year’s election.

I think this is no ordinary time in W3C history; there always are many important topics on the AB’s radar, but several current ones raise to the level of existential questions for the W3C:

• We have an ongoing project to change the legal structure of the W3C from the complex cooperation between universities it has been from the start, to a more conventional non-profit legal entity, and reinventing its governance along the way, while ensuring sure that the finances are solid.

• Partly overlapping with that, is figuring out what to do with the role of the Director, in anticipation that the founding Director and inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, may sooner or later retire. The current model puts of lot of power and responsibility in the role of the Director, so we need to be careful about how we reassign them.

• After many years of strife between the W3C and the WHATWG about the handling of HTML, DOM, and a few other specifications, there’s finally a cooperative way forward emerging. We now have the agreement over which this peace is supposed to be built, but we’ve still got to make it work.

• As we’re trying to make the process by which specifications are developed more agile and in line with the needs of our time, several approaches are being proposed: improving the REC track which W3C has been using so far, creating a new parallel “evergreen” track, combining both… This is at the core of what W3C does, so we’d better get this right.

To fill the 7 seats open on the AB this year, 12 candidates are running. This is an impressive list of highly qualified and motivated people, which makes me optimistic about our prospects at tackling the challenges outlined above regardless of the outcome of this election.

However, not all 12 can be elected, so AC representatives will have to vote. With the current voting system, that means ranking candidates by order of preference. I think these are all great people, and I look forward to working with those who will be elected. At the same time, there are some I am particularly excited about, and would like to encourage voters to rank them high. Here’s my top four:

1. Elika Etemad has been a leading figure in our community for years, excelling both on technical topics as well as on governance and process questions. She is largely responsible for the success of the CSS-WG over the last 10 years, and is uniquely positioned to drive reforms at the W3C while preserving its core values.

2. Eric Siow has been a very reasonable voice in the AC, and his strong senior management experience will be particularly valuable given the topics at hand.

3. Although I only know him by reputation rather than personally, I am particularly impressed with the strong and relevant mix of skills and perspectives Avneesh Singh brings to the table.

4. In addition to having views well-aligned with mine, Alan Stearns is a master consensus builder, which will come in handy as the AB can be an unwieldy group at times.

I could also say good things about many other candidates, but only the top positions in the ranking have a meaningful impact in the results of the vote. For better or worse, this is my pick.

You can also read Elika’s commentary on some of the other candidates on her blog.