Eric Meyer: Hello and welcome to another episode of Igalia Chats. I'm Eric Meyer, a developer advocate at Igalia,
Brian Kardell: And I am Brian Kardell, also a developer advocate at Igalia. And for today we have a special episode about the W3C and we have a special guest. Guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
Seth Dobbs: Hi, yeah, happily. This is Seth Dobbs. I'm the CEO at the World Wide Web Consortium W3C. Eric, Brian, thanks for having me. Really a pleasure to be here today.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, definitely. Really a pleasure to have you on the show. Yeah, so we thought we would talk about all things W3C from what it is and where it came from and how it's evolved over the years and maybe what is and isn't working and yeah, your role. So you're CEO of W3C, which was created in 1995, right?
Seth Dobbs: Yeah. W3C was founded in '94, I think. We celebrated 30 years of existence last fall.
Brian Kardell: That's right, that's right. It's based on this idea from the X consortium, how it would be set up. Tim wrote about that a little bit in his book It didn't have a CEO until when? Do you remember?
Seth Dobbs: there was a CEO was kind of put in place in 2002. Steve Bratt , I believe was the name, and then Jeff Jaffe in 2010. Ralph Swick, our current COO, he has been interim kind of in between each stage kind of filling in and taking the reins to keep things moving while new searches were performed.
Brian Kardell: I found this fascinating because when I got involved in standards, I very carefully read the process and all that stuff, and in order to join the W3C, you needed to have effectively some kind of legal entity, but the W3C itself wasn't a legal entity because it was like this funky...
Seth Dobbs: Hosted model, as we say. It was initially hosted by MIT. MIT basically, I think sponsored it initially essentially and was providing the resources, salaries for the MIT-based team as well as office space and stuff like that, and a place basically, ultimately, to be collecting member dues. ERCIM in Europe, I believe actually technically, INRIA and then ERCIM in Europe was, we just celebrated 30 years in Europe a couple months ago, so they were the first next partner that was also willing to commit resources and effort and stuff like that. Then Keio University in Japan, not too long after. Beihang in China came a little bit later. It wasn't quite as quick a follow, but still, gosh, I think at least 20 years. I think we recently just celebrated, if I recall correctly. So each of those hosted an effort so that you're correct until about two and a half years ago. It wasn't a single entity, it was literally a consortium that included these four hosts and then all the different member organizations as wellThat change going into I think 2023, no, 2022, they spent a lot of time really looking at, okay, how do we separate out former corporation and launched in 2023 or technically December 31st, maybe on 22, the 501(c)(3) public interest nonprofit organization. And they started a new CEO search and that's how I got appointed.
Eric Meyer: My perception of it, and I think the way that it was described to me in at least a few cases was that Tim was essentially a benevolent dictator for life.
Seth Dobbs: I've heard that, yeah.
Eric Meyer: Which can make some people's hackles rise a little bit, and he wasn't a dictator per se, but he was sort of the last word. Technically, organizationally usually if there was some completely unresolvable thing, it would go to Tim and Tim would make a decision. From what I've seen, he would always try to make a decision in the best interest of the fore progress of the web, but that's what the director role was and now we don't have that. Tim has stepped away and we have a CEO, you, but you don't have the same role.. Yeah. It's interesting that the W3C has a CEO, but it's also supposed to be director free. How does that work?
Seth Dobbs: Yeah, it's a very different role. Tim played a unique function. I mean, Tim's played a unique function kind of in the world to a certain extent, certainly in W3C and with the web. And so a lot of his role as a director, we had CEOs of the consortium in parallel to having the director, and so they're actually kind of different functions. As the director, he was really in some ways ultimately kind of in my mind, the technical director sort of moving forward the entire program. And that work is really, and he helped and deliberately paved the way to transition that part of the evolution of the process, particularly over the last, I'd say maybe five years was getting to a point where, as far as developing standards and stuff like that, membership really was driving that with support from team. We obviously, team members, we have really smart people. We have some ideas. We work with the different working groups. It's a good partnership, but there's no authority embedded in W3C team or even myself to say, this will be the standard that won't, not that Tim necessarily had that heavy hand in exercise, but certainly he had a lot of the respect and I think some of that authority. I don’t. I'm really responsible for ultimately making sure that the corporation is durable and therefore the consortium. And so I think a lot about our financial flow. I think a lot about our operations. I think a lot about membership. In particular, acquisition, retention, engagement, making sure we have clear sense of purpose to guide us and stuff like that, but not necessarily really making all the decisions on the standards itself. Eric Meyer: it also moved from having sort of a final arbiter, like one person who was the final arbiter for everything if need be.Now, there isn't a final arbiter really of everything. I think in some ways I think that's pretty fair and I think it's good. The councils, we have formal objection councils. We have various councils that consist of typically myself with only a single vote, and then our two main elected bodies, operational elected bodies: TAG (the technical architecture group) and the AB (our advisory board) both elected by membership and so in some cases where there's true arbitration of certain things, this is the group that meets. And so it's still made, it's made it a little bit more probably democratic. I think it often, to your point, operated that way most of the time, unless... Now the new unless, it’s not one person, which is, I'll say sitting here probably a reasonable thing. I think finding that next one person that would be the final arbiter would've been a very hard thing to get people to agree, to be fair, and certainly not what I saw it in pursuing. I understood this wasn't replacing Tim. This role that I have, CEO, was really about running the organization, steering the organization and working with membership to continue to evolve the web. I'll say team also helps facilitate sometimes where there's conflict or disagreement, we can sometimes be that neutral party. We don't have our own commercial interests, but we don't have the authority that Tim had. We just have the ability to help step in and sometimes help people hear each other and bring things to the front as needed.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, and you said that you weren't trying to replace Tim. I'm just wondering, did you apply? Were you sought out? What was that process like? What is it like to apply for just to even interview for CEO of the stewards of the web?
Seth Dobbs: Yes. In some ways it was kind of a wild ride just to try and I'd been at my last place for about 20 years. I hadn't interviewed in a few decades before going into this, so it was kind of a fascinating experience, but the short version, a colleague, a former colleague that's involved in accessibility had shared the posting for the job search on LinkedIn, and another colleague of mine actually saw it and sent it my way saying, 'Hey, this looks like something that would be really great for you, really interesting and stuff.' And CEO of W3C, having been in web development for most of the existence of the web, while I haven't worked on the standards, very familiar with it just seemed like an amazing opportunity and reading the whole profile and stuff on the expectations and the need and the moment in time, this conversion from four sort of collaborating universities and research facilities to single corporation that partners with some of those still, it just seemed like a really great challenge. So I sent them my cover letter and resume. Igot an initial screen with recruiter, which was just, I mean, incredibly exciting even to make it that far. So I went through that initial screening and that went really well. It was fortuitous. I had recently launched a leadership podcast. I've done a lot of leadership coaching and training throughout probably the latter stage of my career, and that gave me something to direct them to. When he asked me things like, 'Well, what is your leadership style?' I obviously gave him a summary and was able to point to that, but not having standards background, not having a nonprofit background, I really wasn't sure how far I'd go, but I made it to the Zoom panel, so that was with board members, the hiring committee, and that was probably an hour, hour and a half, I can't remember exactly. But basically answering questions from each of the members of the committee and responding and asking my own questions. Then there were time lags as those of you familiar with W3C, everything is consensus driven.So the timeline wasn't quite what was initially promised, but fortunately the recruiter did a good job of keeping me informed and then I was invited out to Wakefield, Massachusetts for an in-person. I think the final three all came in over the course of a few days and almost the entire hiring committee came in, and so we had in-person panel, I had to do a presentation, we had lunch, so we had some casual time and stuff so we could get to know each other. So it was actually the questioning and stuff like that. I'll say it was pretty thorough. They did a really pushed a lot of different things and as I said, fortunate enough in the end, just delighted when I got the email saying that I was getting an offer, truly really exciting day. I think I was on a call with someone and I was trying to quickly hang up so I could run and tell family and friends and stuff
Brian Kardell: You had said in that you didn't have a standards background, so that's kind of my next question is what was your relationship with standards before this? Because it seems like, I don't know. I don't know it's like to be a CEO. I've never been A CEO. But there's a part of me that feels like it'd be awfully really handy to have a good grip on the problem space at least, but maybe it's better to not, and I don't know. I was just kind of curious. I don't really know a lot about your background. We had a nice meeting in California last year, got to sit down and talk a little bit, but we didn't actually get into that. I'll say a thing that's really nice for that is that you did spend an awful lot of time listening to me, which I appreciated. If you could just tell me what was your relationship to standards?
Seth Dobbs: Yeah. Yeah, great question and certainly something that was obviously a key, I'll just say conversation topic during the interview. So my perspective, I haven't worked on standards, but I'm a big believer in them, in the impact in particular long before I even knew this job as possible. I mean for much of my career I've spoken and been constantly just amazed at not just the creation of the web, but it's been put into public domain and being guided by standards. Truly world-changing. We'd have what, 20 versions of AOL, there'd be 5 UKOLs, right? Just imagine what the world would be. Imagine what our jobs would be. It's completely different. It's actually hard to envision what that would be like, and so I'm a huge believer particularly in the impact of what the web is and what the web does, and that happens because of the standards, and that's my biggest driver of why I'm here. , but my focus really as CEO is to, I think, help improve the impact of them. As we look to the future, I think there's a lot more to be done. There's a lot more of the world perhaps that hasn't been touched by the web yet that might have different constraints, different needs, understanding those problems, understanding the kind of human problems, the world problems that these standards can help solve. Understanding the impact that interoperable implementations of them and of our horizontals and such can have. That's really where a lot of my focus is. And then communicating that potentially to now that we're a nonprofit, I can work with potential donors, with funders, with foundations and things like that where we can find aligned interests. Some have said to me, it's hard to see, standards are great, they're important, but they're not necessarily are they aligned with our values. And I've been able to make the case in a couple cases now explaining the impact that yes, in fact this is really in line with what you want to do because of all the different things these standards enable. So that's really my relationship, right? A believer in what they do and the impact of them and a deep appreciation for the people truly that spend, I mean the countless and often thankless hours in putting it in, doing the actual work and the debates and all that to get to a point where we have recommendations that people implement.
Eric Meyer: There was something you said there that I'm a little interested in. You said parts of the world that the web hasn't touched yet. I was under the impression that there were basically no parts of the world that the web hadn't touched, so I'm just wondering...
Seth Dobbs: That's a good question, maybe to clarify. So roughly I think we're around 68% of the world is considered active on the web, so active is maybe the stronger, which in one sense is incredible. But in the other sense, and talking to, gosh, a colleague, a business leader I think from Argentina, when I said that, his immediate response is, 'So 32% really of the world are not really active and what are they missing and are they being left behind.' And stuff like that, which is the perspective I really try to maintain as we think about it, not to sort of rest on the laurels, like 68% is amazing, it's billions. Also, I think I heard a statistic roughly 70% of the users are on a 2 or 3G network as well, so there's constraints. As I sit here in my gigabit service and giant monitor, I've got dozens of devices connected to my internet, multiples running video and stuff like that. It's hard to think about what 2G and 3G is. So that probably could have some focus. So we also don't have a lot of representation in W3C from the global south, and that's something I think there's perhaps some at least indirect cause and effect in that. And so a lot of my thinking about the future is thinking about how to change that, but that's basically what I meant.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, and I also, I think a figure you put in there is really important. Of the 68% of the world that are on the web actively, 70% of them are on 2G or 3G. That's huge.
Seth Dobbs: It is actually, it kind of weighs heavily a little bit on me because you look at the network consumption of downloading your average page and stuff like that with all the stuff that we have in it, and that's just not feasible in a 2G and a 3G network to be actively useful, nevermind the cost of equipment to handle the speed cell phone and less wealthy nations cheaper hardware is going to be the main way things move forward. They've limited memory and all that stuff. So I think that's a challenge that's really in front of us. I don't think the 2G and 3G nature of the world changes that quickly, especially when you start reaching, nevermind the existing, when you reach out to the remaining population that doesn't really have that are in concentrated areas without service. Even in the United States, even in UK, even in other nations such as that, there are pockets of poorer service of less activity and things like that. So there's sort of in some ways, there's two unserved or underserved constituencies that I think perhaps we could take some time to know more about and figure out if there's a way to create standards that enable solutions that meets the constraints in those regions and helps support whatever functions in their society are necessary.
Brian Kardell: The three of us are all involved in W3C. We all know about W3C and how it works and everything, but I think a lot of our listeners probably don't. So to avoid just skipping over some of the lingo that's been used and everything and be able to get at some of the questions that I'd like to ask, I just wanted to say, you talked about these elected bodies. We've talked about the process documents, and so basically when you join the W3C, your organization gets a single representative that's a advisory committee representative, AC rep, who has the ability to cast a vote, let's say. The process is sort of like, it's our constitution in a way that the AC is held to and responsible for, but it lays out how things work and it lays out how things progress along recommendation track and how votes are cast and how votes are counted and all these different things. And I believe also that there is a CEO, for example. So the reason I bring this up is where does the CEO and the team fit into this? Because it sounds very much about the members and that the members show up and the members do the work and the members vote. So where does the CEO and the team fit in? I think a lot of people I must wonder, so let's give them an answer.
Seth Dobbs: Yeah, it's great questions. I think maybe starting with the team and in any organization it's your team, it's the staff that's really doing the majority of the work of the organization. The short version is typically the team proposes after working with membership through preceding processes that I won't go into, proposes basically a charter to create a recommendation and to form a working group in the simplest terms. That is one of the early consensus seeking moments in the process. And sometimes there's questions, sometimes there might be objections I mentioned briefly earlier, there's a council that will handle the objections and address that with support from the team and things like that. So that's in some ways one of the first big moments is making this, we're committing resources both on behalf of team and on behalf of consortium members to actually work towards a recommendation. Moving that through the process. In some cases, we have people that are fairly deep technical experts on team that get into specific working groups to help just provide contribution. We can think about areas like internationalization. We have Richard Ishida and Fuqiao. They are just not just multilingual, they understand language, which is a different thing entirely when you start thinking about how do we enable languages and scripts online and stuff like that. And there's only a few people with the level of that kind of understanding plus technology, and we're fortunate enough to have some on staff. So there's, just to give one example, we have quite a few with security and privacy and accessibility and things like that that we enhance some of the work by being able to contribute to the conversation with deep knowledge. But core to all the team contacts, whether or not they have the relevant technology experience in whatever working group they're supporting is helping move the process forward, is doing our best to support and enable the chairs, enable the group to do their work. So that's a big piece of it. We also do some work with, we do think a lot about sort of the technology strategy. That takes some thinking, it takes some work, which also is done in conjunction in particular with the TAG, our technical architecture group and membership in general. But that's a lot of where our technical work is done is first bringing something to life and then supporting it. The last thing I guess I'll say for the moment on that we drive horizontal review is one of the things we talk about at W3C, and it's fairly distinct in terms of standards development organizations or SDOs in that we don't just have each sort of recommendation set by itself. beyond that, we also have a marketing communication team. Another big piece in part, just keeping a track of 46 or 47 working groups and the hundreds of other interest groups, community groups, the 350-ish members, gosh, I think 15,000 contributors and something 30-some percent of that is based on member employees. So keeping everyone informed is a non-trivial task with that. We've recently hired a chief development officer as well, and so she's here to help work in part benefit from some of that and help drive some of that external communication to work with potential sponsors to work with foundations and things like that to raise funds. So those are some of the big parts of the team. Obviously, another huge part is our Sys team. They provide both the internal team IT support. So making sure our own networks, our own hardware and software and stuff that we need is there. But they also provide support and in many cases develop the tools that the community uses to communicate, to develop standards, to work, all that kind of stuff. So that is making sure all the hosting is correct. We actually, they went through a major project to migrate out of MIT shortly after I started here. That was completed. That was huge. And then my job, I guess going back to, so what does a CEO do? So there's a lot to orchestrate there, right? Part of it is working. I appreciate Brian, you commenting on how much I listen. I do think that's central to a CEO's job is listening. I can't really make good decisions without understanding things. And so a lot of my job in part is listening to membership, listening to other stakeholders and potential stakeholders, what may be potential members, be they policymakers looking to understand our standards better to figure out ideally how to maybe inform policy with some of what our community's done, all sorts of potential there. So that's a part of it is really a lot of stakeholder management, both in team and membership, but also even in the outside world. Financial management, the responsibility of making sure we're a healthy organization, that we have a viable future as far as that goes, that we continue to be funded to do the work that we need to listen for those opportunities. I think historically and understandably, we being heavily funded by member fees, there's sometimes a lot of appetite even amongst membership to do things, but then when it comes to, well, how do we support it? How do we pay for it? We get into these kinds of discussions of, 'Well, if we do A, we can't do B. If we do B, we can't do A.' And this has happened both amongst the community as anywhere. And so part of my job is to not just let those conversations be silenced, but to hear where there's important things that the community thinks need to be developed that collectively we all believe is part of the future of the web and figure out how we can make it happen.
Brian Kardell: I feel like also there are legal aspects to what you have to do in terms of holding patents and searching for patents and protecting this, and then organizing events. There's not just that happens in person, but then there's also workshops sometimes that are in person, sometimes that are virtual. There is really a lot of things that W3C does, and I'm glad that you mentioned that the membership frequently has an appetite that's bigger than their ability to figure out how we're going to do it Because it's not just membership. I mean, I think that's a really common thing that we need to find ways to glue it to reality. And I think this is an interesting point where there's several things we could talk about. For example, historically, W3C has been a membership organization this is how much it costs to join, and once you join, you can put unlimited number of people onto working groups and things like that. I think mainly, funding is about membership. And you mentioned in there, are there things we can do with foundations or yeah, are there other kinds of fundings that we can get from grants, from governments, from, I don't know how much we've explored these things, but a lot of the work that we do has to do with internationalization, accessibility, important things that deserve to be funded and yeah, I don't know. What do you think about looking into increasing ways of funding that aren't just about membership or maybe even looking into more creative kinds of membership? I know some people, Coralie and I, among them, were looking for a long time at, is there some way we can have an individual membership of some kind?
Seth Dobbs: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think a lot about something I've been starting to be more active on and one of the, I'll say, challenges of a member-driven organization is the conflating of income with the work that's done. And so our work is done by membership and our funding is done by membership, which is obviously it's a good system, it works, but sometimes it gets, it’s hard to separate participation, which is maybe the notion of individual memberships. We have invited experts that can come in, which is a different program, not just anyone can do that. We might want to have a filter on that. So there's almost two questions there in my mind, which is one, how do we bring the right people, however you decide what that means, to a particular table, to have a discussion around a standard and how do we have enough of the people to ensure the right inputs into it to make sure it's a meaningful standard that is then going to actually be embraced and implemented in a truly interoperable fashion. And then how do we fund doing all those activities? So I actually do think of them separate, even though about 90% of it is the same today, but I think a point you're making, Brian, I want to talk a little bit about the history of our funding and then more about the future as a 501(c)(3). I think we have a greater opportunity than ever to seek that. Now we have been funded by grants in the past, and I think some in Europe, some in the US, we've had an HHS grant. We have a Ford Foundation grant. I think we released a press release now, I can't even remember how long ago. But a two-year grant from them primarily focused around accessibility. A lot of our accessibility work and internationalization work has given us grants. A lot of the accessibility work has actually been funded heavily by grants over the years. So the Ford Foundation is our first as a new corporation first, but for sure not last because I think that it gives us an opportunity to fulfill our mission with more than just standards. A lot of our web accessibility initiative, WAI, W-A-I, works on the standards, but also works on so many different supporting tools to enable implementers, developers, designers, et cetera, et cetera, to truly understand accessibility so that it actually gets implemented well from start to finish. And that's an important part of fulfilling the mission for Web For All is doing that kind of enablement. So some of the funding's been around providing training and resources and things like that. Additional funding also can help us prove out interoperability. There's some proof of concept discussions we're in right now for projects to actually take some standards that haven't been truly implemented in the field yet and see if there's an opportunity to do that. In conjunction with the actual work itself, there's been opportunities to look at accelerating processes or accelerating work around a specific standard. So I think these tools give us some additional, whether it's through a foundation, through member organization, sometimes we'll fund bringing us together to make sure things get done. That's happened occasionally. So there's a few different ways we can do this, and the more we can kind of build that up, the more flexibility we have in terms of how do we think about our membership and their ability to come in and do work? How do we bring in the right people? So there's sort of this cycle of back and forth in my mind of being able to hopefully progress in how we're funded and have a larger percent than 10% of our funding being non-member fee based, and then seeing what that provides us and how we can continue advance the mission and get more participation in the work that we do.
Eric Meyer: Things that haven't been implemented. Can you say more about that?
Seth Dobbs: We're looking at opportunities to, 'Hey, can we get everyone in a room ahead of TPAC?' So for those that aren't W3C, people that are listening, TPAC is our annual gathering where we actually bring, gosh, a pretty high percentage of our working groups come together in one place. We get probably 20 plus operating in parallel in different rooms in a convention center or a hotel face-to-face. And while we do so much of our work virtually, and as CEO of W3C Inc. I believe, heavily using the web to get a lot of stuff done, sometimes you need to get people in the same room just to drive some stuff forward. And we still try to, we can't get everyone in. There's a whole bunch of reasons people can't make it into the room, and so we still try to facilitate remote access to that and stuff like that. Just to be clear, that accessibility is truly important and there's so many different reasons people can't or won't travel, but we find sometimes it is helpful to get everyone in, I will say time zone synchronization at a minimum to be able to not lose days in a conversation. I think that's one of our biggest challenges, and it's the same in any global standards development organization. We're not all in the same time zone. Literally the sun never sets on W3C. While we don't have a footprint in certain continents to a certain extent, if you go east to west, we cover almost every time zone.Tteam does with some recent additions. I think there isn't an hour on a weekday there isn't someone that's actually awake and working. And so that's great in some ways, right? It's amazing that so many people from so many different parts of the world are working on this stuff. But it also sometimes mean, especially if you've just simply tried to schedule a meeting with people across an 18-hour span of time zones, it can take two days just to get to an agreement of one to have something. And so discussions can sometimes just take this long rotation as people read, digest and things like that, and that can make some work slow or take longer, I should say, to execute. And so there's a lot of advantage sometimes that's why we do TPAC. One of the big things that we do there is get this synchronous time, and there have sometimes been meetings throughout the year where a group will say, 'Hey, we need to get together.' Being able to fund that and to accelerate that I think is something that's very exciting. Standards organizations are somewhat notoriously not swift, I'll say. There's reasons for not just quickly knocking out a standard. To be very clear and very fair, there is an appropriate time that's taken, but there's various reasons that sometimes things just time elapses without progression of work. And so being able to get that synchronous time and being able to maybe find ways to fund more of that I think would be incredibly meaningful both to our W3C membership, but to the world because that brings improvements out into the web.
Eric Meyer: You mentioned a little bit back that the W3C recently published a vision statement.
Seth Dobbs: Yes.
Eric Meyer: When was that and what is the vision?
Seth Dobbs: Let's see. So our vision was published July 29th. This has gone through a fairly long process to gather input in writing it, in approving it across our membership. As Brian, I think mentioned earlier, the consensus notion of not necessarily voting, but saying, yeah, this is in a state that we feel ready to put this out into the world. So we want to all...
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it's consensus driven. It takes time.
Seth Dobbs: It takes time. It takes time to get this. I'll say I'm impressed because it's hard to crowdsource a meaningful vision. It actually tends to be a diluting effect. And I'm actually very, very happy with the work that was done here. I'll say the core vision briefly because there's a longer document. Anyone that's interested we'll maybe post the link with the show notes. I think it's worthwhile because it includes a core vision, a longer description of it, and then really important to realize in a vision are operating principles. And so this provides a guidance, right? A good vision. I recently blogged about this as well, probably July 30th or 31st I think it came out, on the importance of a vision and how it really provides guidance to, especially such a broad organization, helps with prioritization. It helps with alignment around decision-making without it being prescriptive. That's a really important element, that balance is really important and vision. So the principles help emphasize what's important in operating and running and making the day to day. But the core vision, there's four key pieces that are the core vision of the World Wide Web. First is that the web is for all humanity. Second is that the web is designed for the good of all people. Third is that the web must be safe to use. And fourth, there is one interoperable, World Wide Web, not the dozens of “nation online” or whatever it might be that I've mentioned, but a single interoperable World Wide Web. This is really, in some ways, those of us that have been even developing on the web, nevermind working in the standards has been, some of this has been fairly clear, though interoperable in particular I think has always been just such a key drive. It's why even some of the largest corporations in the world are here in that belief that we're all better by having a single interoperable web than by having any kind of fractured or siloed version of it. But I think the first emphasis on the web for all humanity, and then second, the good of all people, I think is a great statement to be made as a vision for a technology standards organization. The rooting in humanity and the needs of people and fulfilling that kind of purpose is part of the appeal to me, again, in coming here and in being a CEO of this organization, something I can be very proud to represent and very excited to. But it's good. It provides a kind of guidance for the organization. And even though it hadn't been published yet, I had seen where it mostly was, there was a lot of internal work and it helped drive some strategic initiatives that I recently worked with the board on and other members of other elected bodies in our community to publish as well. So really a good vision, a good mission drives so much of what an organization does. And I believe this is the first clear vision statement that we've actually had as a community. 30 years in. It's none too soon from a leadership perspective. But I'll also say as we've been just in this moment of change, of changing of Tim, our founder, and the inventor of the web, leaving of our corporate structure, trying to figure out what's next. This really roots us into the future in a way that I think is very positive.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, I mean, I will say that those four principles, as someone who has been involved with standards in W3C for a long time, I think those, they pretty accurately encapsulate or sum up what the W3C has always done. Even the web must be safe to use. I don't know if I would've put it that way, if I'd been asked to, but all of the accessibility and security and privacy reviews that happen. Yeah, that's what that's about. So it is a really good sort of distillation, even if it's the first vision statement that W3C has ever had. It's almost saying, 'Well, this is what we've been doing. This has been the vision. We've just written it down now.' But it is always good to write these things down. Jeremy Keith had a talk, at least at one point about, 'If you have guiding principles, it's a real good idea to write them down because then everyone can see them.' So yeah, it's really, really nice to see that.
Seth Dobbs: Particularly I think, we talked about the absence of a director, the formal role of being the final decision. It's not that individuals are making decisions. It's not even completely the groups are making decisions. They're making decisions in line with this vision.
Brian Kardell: You mentioned before that there's this tension in the fact that you pay to be a member, but then you also pay to do the work. And there are implications to that, practical implications. I'm kind of grateful that the big companies have funded as much as they have and everything, but they overwhelmingly fund the working group in terms of participation. So like CSS working group, as an example, has 178 different participants, including 16 invited experts that represent 25 organizations and 109 of those people, or 123 if you count Igalia are from just the main vendors. And so it's like by far, the vast majority of people are from those who show up and do a lot of the work. When you look at a specification that reaches recommendation or whatever, almost always the editor is associated with some big tech company and it's because, well, it takes a long time to drive through all that stuff and somebody has to fund their participation in their work. sothere are gobs of proposals and standards and things that are brought by those other membersBut effectively, we're trying to reason with these other companies to spend their budget, allocate their budget the way we believe it should be. And to their credit, they do a lot of that. They do, but there are also ideas that are maybe important that don't get the attention that we would like, or maybe things that don't fit so well in the browser like print, is an example for a long time, didn't get the attention that the browsers wanted to give itI have thought for a long time now that to this point that you made earlier about finding ways to ground things in reality, what if membership put money into a common pot and there was something that bound that where at the end of the year, so much of this has to be spent on what membership agrees. Some binding thing where we can't get everybody to get everything that they want. I really appreciate that beautiful idea that you have. I too want that thing, but these are the funds that we have, so which thing should we do? And I feel like if we did something like that, we would getmore how do we cooperate and achieve the things that are maybe on the fringes a little bit. So I'd just like to give you the opportunity to respond to that and tell me that's absolutely hogwash and what a stupid idea.
Seth Dobbs: In some ways, it's a complex questionIn terms of participation, absolutely. Some organizations are much better funded. There are some very large organizations that only contribute a few people. Interestingly, some that contribute a lot. And I want to say our largest group of member organizations are under 10 employees or members of it. That's actually the largest number that we have. So we do have an interesting balance. And so it's a good question leading into what you're saying is how do we find that balance to a certain extent, the membership, at least the way we operate today, the membership fees are that pool and we work through the process to kind of prioritize. We are looking at ways of various flavors of incubation of sort of matriculation from early idea in a community group or an interest group, and how do we maybe better cull those for things that should move into standards work, into a working group to have more of the true formal process. Because again, for those that aren't involved in W3C, working groups are formal process groups. Community groups, and interest groups are really open to pretty much anyone to come in and participate and have discussions and they don't sort of create the recommendations, but they can be where a lot of preliminary work is done. In terms of the actual so-called, as you say, voting that the Advisory committee does. That's how a charter gets approved. Each organization has that one vote to approve that. Often it's mostly people that are interested in that particular piece of work that you see take the time to make a vote. So that gives you a gauge of participation. And so part of it is trying to find that balance. Definitely, we don't do that perfectly.We can't force people to participate in things that they aren't interested in. And because we have so many of these 10 or less, 10 or fewer people organizations, their one person is participating in the one thing that is interesting to their business, important to their business. And so literally they ignore, understandably, I don't mean that in a bad way, but they don't pay attention to much of what else is going on. And I think to be clear, I think there's value in that. I think there's value that we are this gathering place where a narrow interest can still be in part of what's very important to them and still has an impact on the web. So how do we continue to prioritize that is the bigger question. How do we make sure things aren't lost? I do think the vision is a place that starts. One of the things that we're working on, it's one of the strategic initiatives that I've briefly alluded to is around creating kind of an impact framework. And so that's not something we always think about in standards organizations is the impact of the work that we do. But as I said, it's a lot of why I'm here because I passionately believe in it. I think the more we can articulate through our vision, our mission, our horizontals, the change we're trying to create in the world, and look at ways to measure that, which is a lofty goal, but I think something we can do, that starts driving even more tangiblyhe conversations around this is actually pretty important work because it feeds into this, it feeds into this, and it has this impact on this part of society or this community or whatever.but I think that can sometimes help us, that can bring some clarity that's taking the vision and taking it to the next step of, okay, what do we mean by web for all? What do we mean by good for humanity? How do we know that we've even done something that approaches that? And that starts operationalizing our vision, our mission, and hopefully starts creating perhaps different processes, different structures to do that. One of the things I'd certainly want to be able to figure out a way to, I'll say in quotes, 'measure', is interoperability? It's not just, oh, there's multiple browsers, but that there's this level of security is available not just on browsers. The web is accessed by so many different things now. There's publishing, which is kind of a branch off into EPUB and things like that. There's different devices. There's web of things where again, we're interfacing with it. And so there's more than just measuring the browser when we think about interoperability depending on what the standard is for. And so getting smarter about that can also potentially help drive, I think some of what you're getting at Brian, which is how do we push some of these other things forward that are more maybe global priorities. And so I'm hoping this starts giving us those mechanisms to even have that kind of conversation in a way that can be meaningful.
Eric Meyer: You're the CEO of the W3C. The W3C has a vision, but what's your vision? What do you want the W3C to be like in the future, either immediately or long-term after you've stepped down? And are there things that you think need to change or things that you particularly think should not change?
Seth Dobbs: I think we're only just scratching the surface, honestly. And so a lot of my vision, certainly for W3C, we celebrated 30 years. A lot of my internal talk was, well, I'm thinking about the next 30. I don't plan to be here for all 30, just to be clear. But making sure we're set up with all these changes, this inflection point that we're kind of in terms of Tim stepping down and there's several technical standards organizations that are reaching this phase of so much momentum from early people, from inventors, from founders, from creators, but also just initial participants, whether they're on team or in membership. We have 30-year people here. There's a lot of momentum that's built by that. But at the same time, we're moving on to other things in our other stages of our life at that point. And so how do we continue that or how do I help ensure that our organization has this continuity into the future and is structured to do that? A W3C that is still making a meaningful impact on the world 10, 20 years from now, that's really what I hope future generations see the ongoing and are excited by the work and understand the import of it. So that's the biggest thing. An organization that's clear on the impact that it has on the world, because an organization that does that, whether it's for profit or non-profit like us, is far more successful because you have that clarity and we have a lot of these pieces together. Getting smarter, getting more capable, I should say, at measuring it, at articulating it, at demonstrating it in a way that's meaningful to the world and participants, whether it's by contributing to standards in one form or another, or contributing money in the process of it, I think is important. So seeing a broader range of stakeholders involved is probably another big piece of that, and that's part of how I think we make sure we can listen to parts of the world where we're not prominent and serve them as well, as well as serve obviously the existing community. I think those are probably the two big things I think about in the future.having a clear process is good. I think there's some work going on now there's been some talk of now that we've kind of dust has settled on certain corporate things for the most part and stuff like that, what's next? And do have a process that's fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world. It's cliche to say technology changes quickly, but I've been around for decades. We're at a pace that is stunning at times, and a formal multi-year process isn't the only tool we should have in our toolbox to support the world because that's time-consuming and it requires a certain amount of knowledge of what's needed to create a standard. But how do we enable industries that are moving quickly and how do we bring communities in those industries together to have the conversations of, 'Okay, what is at least our de facto, what are we trying to accomplish? What is maybe an underpinning? Let's not compete here.” Literally what a standard ultimately is. Let's not compete at this level so we can innovate on this. Let's stop focusing parallel dollars in places that don't make sense. Those conversations, I'd be really interested into getting more formally around in those explicit terms that are pre-standards work, and I think there's a need for that. I think it's one of the big questions that I receive. How do we handle this fast moving times? And there's a lot of ideas in the community
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I think that some of the things that you said there that jump out at me about basically the process that we have now is really good at some kinds of things, is really good at CSS. Like this is sort of like the flagship standard I would say at W3C. But it is tricky. It is impossible to know which things will be successful before they're successful. And historically, I think that standards organizations don't have a great history at innovation. And I think another thing that I try to stress all the time is that no standards organization is frozen in time. They're all constantly evolving, trying to figure out how to do better, and they have changed an awful lot. Like W3C has created community groups, we've created incubation. The process has evolved in a whole bunch of ways. I think that there's probably plenty more to do in that regard. Even back in 2014, I proposed to the AC that we should find a way to allocate money for studying the web because we don't do that. And that is mainly left to people that volunteers at the HTTP archive or people who are paid to do the HTTP archive.And I think we could learn a lot about what could be more easily standardized and find participants outside the norms looking at different kinds of patterns that are used on the web. But yeah, I'm really keen on where we go from here and how we concretely, like, what steps we take how do we make sure that we're an attractive place to develop maybe the next big thing and make it conducive to standardizing the next big thing? I do see that there is efforts to standardize things in MCP is a really popular thing right now that people are standardizing how these AI agents can communicate. I don't know where it's happening or if it's happening anywhere, but I would like to know that at least at some point there is like maybe we should take this to W3C, even if they don't. I'd like to hear that articulated and reasoned out. Do you know what I mean? How do we...
Seth Dobbs: Yes, same. I mean, it's a good way of articulating another sort of thought in the strategy and some of my goals, which is being recognized as a place where people that don't necessarily currently do work here as a place that is an interesting, valuable place to bring ideas to bring work like that. And that takes a bit of communication and stuff like that and proof points and talking about it the right way in terms of just not missing some of the rapidly moving changes. We can look at a lot of recent developments in the last 10 years, I'll say, in technology that have had a lot of hype. I'll say a high financial hype cycle. And I say that just to separate hype doesn't mean that there isn't value. I said in a talk at W3C event that in my career, the most over hyped technology I've seen is the web because it took the US stock market's 10 years to recover from the dot-com crash, and we're still here and there's still a lot to do and there's a lot of work to do. So separating sort of the froth, which has sometimes turns people off in our community and elsewhere from actually understanding it is one of the hard things that I think we need to figure out. So the short version to sort of what you said, we're becoming more aware. I think there are members, there's always members that feel that whatever the newest thing is that it's an important thing. And I think being able to listen to that, and one of our team members did a report on AI last year and really evaluating the different ways it can impact the web. Is there going to be an AI standard? No. Are there going to be many like all standards? Yes. Because there are different aspects that probably have appropriate standardization in different places, possibly data format for sharing and spreading so we don't have to keep cranking through all the same kind of model generation, communication between them, conversational interfaces, things like that. We have concerns around provenance of information on the web, deepfakes on things like that, on preventing them from overburdening servers and stuff like that, from scraping it. There's a robots.txt and the equivalent of that. There's a lot of different ways that AI impacts the web and vice, and then there's ways that AI has nothing to do with it potentially depending on the aspect of it. So we need to be good at threading that needle sometime of what's relevant now that we should be addressing. And that's also part of the strategic work. One of the key initiatives is laying exactly like what are those attributes that we look for that we can say, 'Hey, this is something we should be talking about more.' It starts there and then, 'Oh, we actually should be talking about it a little bit more. Actually, this needs something. How do we pull then, the right people here?' Ideally, I'd like people to find us, but we can also pull when we see that there's web or enough web adjacency and work to build momentum within our existing membership that can then draw additional membership that are more purely rooted in the new space, if that makes sense.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it does. Well, Seth, I think we've kept you long enough. I mean, we'd love to keep talking about this for hours.
Seth Dobbs: Great questions. Obviously passionate about this stuff and love talking about it. So again, I appreciate you all taking some time with me.
Eric Meyer: Oh, please, thank you so much for taking time out of your CEO duties to talk to us about this. Maybe we'll do a follow-up at some point in the future, see where things are, but any last things people should look at or things you want to say?
Seth Dobbs: Yeah, I mean, hopefully listeners that haven't been involved in one way or another, there's come t o W3.org to learn more about us. There's a lot of ways to get involved, whether it's participation, whether it's reviewing stuff that we put out to the public, whether it's helping fund us. There's a lot of different ways you can help move our mission and vision forward. So please encourage everyone. Even if you do think you know us, I will say there's always more to learn about us .
Brian Kardell: Yeah, we'll drop about a half dozen links in the show notes to things that we mentioned here.
Seth Dobbs: Awesome.
Brian Kardell: Thanks again, Seth, for joining us.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell
Seth Dobbs