It has been few months that I have been with the W3C AB. Me and my co-advisors have met 3 times face to face, and had monthly calls to address topics related to W3C governance and strategy.

What are we supposed to discuss ? Any topic that any W3C members representative would raise, but also, anything AB believe would be helpful to deal with, in order to consolidate a strategy. While the AB meeting minutes are for W3C members only, one should note that most of the activity is held in public. That is why I encourage any curious to have a look at the W3C AB public wiki.

What is under the spot ? In the recent weeks, AB members have been negotiating what would be their main priorities in the coming year. We collected several ideas, and ranked them, based on the relevance, and the energy each of us would be ready to put on it. We came with a list of 10 projects. And I would like to emphasis here some of them that would be of interest for any W3C member and non-member.

My fav one project. Designing a long term W3C strategy. Discussion will be around finding the main area of development, where W3C should invest in order to serve its different communities. This project is detailed on a public wiki and activity can be followed on the public mailing list on whihc anyone can subscribe.

My fav’ two project (so fav that I am leading it). Making sure we keep coordination across W3C communities. the rapid development of the open web platform feature, addressing different markets, causes multiple and parallel design of new technology. this project will make sure that the synchronization is kept across the different stake holders, from W3C staff to chairs and editors. It deals with communication, process and fluid knowledge. Public wiki and public mailing list are available. Our next call will be on the 1st of December at 16:00 UTC.

My fav’ three. W3C is facing a lots of creative, multiple and constant requests for new use cases, features, improvement. And on the other hand, W3C has to maintain the existing technology. Would it be possible to detect among the new coming topic, and among the maintained topic, the ones not destinated to success ? The ones that we should stop, in order to refocus W3C forces on on high priority topics. That project is documented on that wiki.

Some other remarkable initiatives. Not all the interesting stuff to make W3C better are done in Advisory Board. Recently I have noticed two remarkable initiatives.

1) a mailing list to track any W3C working group or interest group creation http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/

2) a mailing for working groups to request reviews on their specifications http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-review-announce/2014Nov/

A very good news. Some of you might have followed that W3C was working on a mean to better regroup web developers community. The good news is that W3C has endorsed the principle to have a web developer program, based on a minimum subscription, web dev will be able to demonstrate their W3C affiliation (or at least support). First details of the plan can be found under  http://www.w3.org/2014/11/Webizen.html, or you may follow @W3C_Webizen Twitter account.

Obviously if you have any idea for improving W3C working methods, environment and process, feel free to post your ideas on the public mailing list public-w3process@w3.org (archives) or contact me on @poupita !

Note : picture “historic women at work” by Christine Myaskovsky