[Engineering] W3C

Mon Nov 5 17:26:18 UTC 2018

To follow on to this, the big question around joining the W3C is whether
we'd get enough value out to make it worth our while.  In talking with
current members, they've emphasized that value is really dependent on the
amount of time and effort that you're able to put in.

Given that, I put together a quick survey
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfC9OT2-Dbg1eDILznodkpFmzHhZCPR0AukzSvP7OjFcSq38Q/viewform?usp=sf_link>
to gauge interest across the Foundation.  It should only take a couple of
minutes, and it doesn't commit you to anything -- this is just a way for us
to figure out whether we should invest in nailing down the details of
membership.

The survey is here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfC9OT2-Dbg1eDILznodkpFmzHhZCPR0AukzSvP7OjFcSq38Q/viewform?usp=sf_link

Thanks!

- Ian

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 12:39 AM Gilles Dubuc <gilles at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> A couple of months ago I became an invited expert
> <https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/about> on the W3C Web
> Performance working group <https://www.w3.org/webperf/>. This is in a
> personal capacity, until the WMF might decide to join the W3C.
>
> I recently attended TPAC <https://www.w3.org/2018/10/TPAC/>, the W3C
> technical plenary/advisory committee in Lyon, where most of the working
> groups meet face to face once a year.
>
> The reason why I joined the working group and attended TPAC, beyond
> personal interest, was to figure out if it would be worthwhile for the WMF
> to be a W3C member organisation.
>
> What was the most striking about attending that particular working group
> is how little representation actual websites have. Facebook and Akamai had
> a couple of people each who participated actively, but then the rest was
> mostly the 4 big browser vendors talking between themselves. The existing
> members of the group and the co-chairs were very excited that I was
> attending, because they crave for feedback about the standards they're
> working on from people who will actually end up using them in the wild at
> scale. I think that my input influenced some decisions and prioritisation,
> as I was able to provide potential use cases and real-life examples of how
> we leverage existing standards. Overall it felt like we should have been
> part of these discussions a long time ago - and the people making the
> standards wish we were - and the reason why some standards sometimes don't
> quite fit what we need is probably that our input was missing, or that it
> had less visibility as github issues/comments.
>
> The discussions between the browser vendors were very interesting. The
> technical level was very high, which made me realise in some discussions
> that I still have a lot to learn about the inner details of browsers and
> javascript. I learned a lot. It was also fascinating to discover that some
> of the reasons why some browsers don't support standard X or Y are social,
> based on some people in the group being more conservative than others. The
> Apple folks rejected a lot of proposals initially, stating that they needed
> compelling use cases before considering implementation. And sometimes I was
> able to provide some, and saw that they were influenced by what I was
> saying. I can't say that I convinced them, but I think that without these
> exchanges it's guaranteed that Safari wouldn't have supported what we were
> discussing.
>
> In terms of the conference itself, this is one of the conferences with the
> most brilliant people per square meter I've had the chance to attend.
> Everyone is an expert in their field. If you care about the web, it's a
> great experience, you can't attend and not learn a lot.
>
> Attending TPAC has reinforced my belief that we should be embedded in the
> decision-making process that defines the future of web standards. If we
> want standards that help our mission, that correspond to our needs, we need
> to be there and participate when the decisions are made.
>
> Now, the next step in the internal discussions about whether or not the
> WMF should join the W3C, is to figure out if there are other people other
> than myself who would be interested in being active participants in W3C
> working groups. The time commitment is a few hours per week to do it right
> (most groups have a bi-weekly one hour meeting). Discussions and standards
> work usually happen on mailing lists, IRC and github.
>
> You can check out the list of working groups
> <https://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities#Working>and see if there are
> some that are relevant to your work (I bet there are...).
>
> If you think you might be interested in joining a W3C working group or
> interest group, let me know and I'll loop you into the "should we join"
> internal discussions we've been having.
>
>
>
>
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