Now that the PR incorporating the Strategic Goals section has landed, the content of the Vision seems complete. It's time to work on making the presentation more crisp and compelling.
It could get crisper by combining redundant and similar points within and across sections. For example, "accessibility" is used 4 times, twice as Principles, once as a Goal, and once as part of W3C's Identity.
It would be more compelling if structured as a narrative about W3C's new commitment to Integrity rather than as 25 separate bullet points organized into 4 categories.
As an illustration (that's not ready to be a Pull Request), here's an example of recasting most of the key points in the current Vision into a more narrative-driven form. The Goals section in particular needs fleshing out with more concrete objectives, and it needs a "call to action" at the end, but what's below should give the flavor of what I'm suggesting:
W3C's Vision for the Next Decade
The web started as a way to share information across organizations, geographies, and technology platforms. Under W3C’s stewardship, It has become much more than that; the Web is a fundamental part of the lives of much of humanity, enabling access to information, commerce and shopping, social experiences, civic functions, entertainment, and it has catalyzed major social changes.
But the Web's phenomenal success has led to many unintended consequences that inflict significant distress on society: openness and anonymity enable scams, phishing, and fraud. Ease of gathering personal information spawned business models that mined and sold detailed user behaviors, without people’s awareness or consent. The acceleration of global information sharing enabled misinformation to flourish, be exploited for political or commercial gain, divide societies, and incite hate.
So, we must do better. We must address these unintended consequences in the standards we develop, and improve the web platform's fundamental integrity as it continues to grow in scope and importance.
Values
The first step is to clarify W3C's Values and ensure our work is aligned with them.
The Founding Director implicitly, and to some extent explicitly, applied several core values in guiding W3C over its earlier history. There is one interoperable world wide web for all humanity; it must be usable by people with all ability levels, languages, and cultures; and the web platform should respect the security and respecting the privacy of users. W3C has developed reasonably clear definitions of Accessibility and Internationalization and successfully applied them to improve the Web over its history. Security and Privacy are less clearly defined and applied, but W3C will work in progress to remedy that. For example, a Privacy Threat Model, once brought to maturity and broad acceptance, can guide standards work in the way explicit A11Y and I18N criteria do now.
Some standards groups -- see for example the TAG's Design Principles and IETF's RFC 8890 -- are making another core value more explicit: the web should be designed for the good of its users; W3C must put their needs above those of spec authors, website publishers, and platform implementers. W3C will also commit to having the TAG position published as an authoritative W3C document and find effective ways to incorporate its guidance into the standards incubation, review, and ratification process.
Therefore W3C will prioritize building a workable consensus among a core of active stakeholders to make these Integrity values an concrete part of the standards review process.
Operating Principles
Furthermore, W3C will double down on ensuring that its community and actions reflect clear Principles:
We will strive for diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, accessibility needs, gender identities, and more.
We will seek consensus among key stakeholders in the web community when allocating resources, starting standardization efforts, and ratifying the results. If true consensus is not possible, we will ensure that dissenting opinions are respected, accommodated as much as possible, and reconsidered as work progresses.
We will drive interoperability across vendors and implementations using open test suites, a strong patent policy and open licenses. Promising ideas will not be incorporated into "standards" until they are broadly implemented, used, and proven to actually work for the intended purpose.
We will encourage incubation eforts in new areas and industries with open platforms for discussion, collaboration and innovation. The web must continue to evolve to address new challenges and fix the problems previous iterations created.
Concrete Goals
Finally, W3C will be accountable for progress toward concrete Goals :
Evolve a unified web architecture, which continues to address evolving use cases.
Build and maintain respected relationships with governments and businesses for providing credible advice.
Improve efforts on incubation, make it more structured and improve consensus building among the key stake holders.
Achieve more worldwide participation, diversity and inclusion for establishing W3C as representative of the worldwide community.
Increase involvement of underrepresented key stake holders like representatives of end users, content creators, developers etc.
Establish and improve collaborative relationship with other organizations and governments working in the domain of internet and web standards.
Now that the PR incorporating the Strategic Goals section has landed, the content of the Vision seems complete. It's time to work on making the presentation more crisp and compelling.
It could get crisper by combining redundant and similar points within and across sections. For example, "accessibility" is used 4 times, twice as Principles, once as a Goal, and once as part of W3C's Identity.
It would be more compelling if structured as a narrative about W3C's new commitment to Integrity rather than as 25 separate bullet points organized into 4 categories.
As an illustration (that's not ready to be a Pull Request), here's an example of recasting most of the key points in the current Vision into a more narrative-driven form. The Goals section in particular needs fleshing out with more concrete objectives, and it needs a "call to action" at the end, but what's below should give the flavor of what I'm suggesting:
W3C's Vision for the Next Decade
The web started as a way to share information across organizations, geographies, and technology platforms. Under W3C’s stewardship, It has become much more than that; the Web is a fundamental part of the lives of much of humanity, enabling access to information, commerce and shopping, social experiences, civic functions, entertainment, and it has catalyzed major social changes.
But the Web's phenomenal success has led to many unintended consequences that inflict significant distress on society: openness and anonymity enable scams, phishing, and fraud. Ease of gathering personal information spawned business models that mined and sold detailed user behaviors, without people’s awareness or consent. The acceleration of global information sharing enabled misinformation to flourish, be exploited for political or commercial gain, divide societies, and incite hate.
So, we must do better. We must address these unintended consequences in the standards we develop, and improve the web platform's fundamental integrity as it continues to grow in scope and importance.
Values
The first step is to clarify W3C's Values and ensure our work is aligned with them.
The Founding Director implicitly, and to some extent explicitly, applied several core values in guiding W3C over its earlier history. There is one interoperable world wide web for all humanity; it must be usable by people with all ability levels, languages, and cultures; and the web platform should respect the security and respecting the privacy of users. W3C has developed reasonably clear definitions of Accessibility and Internationalization and successfully applied them to improve the Web over its history. Security and Privacy are less clearly defined and applied, but W3C will work in progress to remedy that. For example, a Privacy Threat Model, once brought to maturity and broad acceptance, can guide standards work in the way explicit A11Y and I18N criteria do now.
Some standards groups -- see for example the TAG's Design Principles and IETF's RFC 8890 -- are making another core value more explicit: the web should be designed for the good of its users; W3C must put their needs above those of spec authors, website publishers, and platform implementers. W3C will also commit to having the TAG position published as an authoritative W3C document and find effective ways to incorporate its guidance into the standards incubation, review, and ratification process.
Therefore W3C will prioritize building a workable consensus among a core of active stakeholders to make these Integrity values an concrete part of the standards review process.
Operating Principles
Furthermore, W3C will double down on ensuring that its community and actions reflect clear Principles:
We will strive for diversity and inclusion of participants from different geographical locations, cultures, languages, accessibility needs, gender identities, and more.
We will seek consensus among key stakeholders in the web community when allocating resources, starting standardization efforts, and ratifying the results. If true consensus is not possible, we will ensure that dissenting opinions are respected, accommodated as much as possible, and reconsidered as work progresses.
We will drive interoperability across vendors and implementations using open test suites, a strong patent policy and open licenses. Promising ideas will not be incorporated into "standards" until they are broadly implemented, used, and proven to actually work for the intended purpose.
We will encourage incubation eforts in new areas and industries with open platforms for discussion, collaboration and innovation. The web must continue to evolve to address new challenges and fix the problems previous iterations created.
Concrete Goals
Finally, W3C will be accountable for progress toward concrete Goals :