Running for The W3C Advisory Board

I remember when I first started writing web code. I saw the W3C as this magical organization where standards were forged by the luminaries of the field. I romanticized standards work and, even though I couldn't read a specification back then, I followed their development eagerly.

I love the W3C. I feel so lucky to work in a field where the value of collaboration and openness is realized so acutely between competing institutions. That is why I am so proud to announce my candidacy for the W3C Advisory Board through nominations from Mozilla and jQuery.

I am running on a platform of closing the specification gap between web developers and browser implementors with Lea Verou, Arthur Barstow, Virginie Galindo and David Singer, to continue the work started by Alex Russel, Yehuda Katz, Dave Herman, Domenic Denicola, Anne Van Kesstren, Marcos Cáceres, Sergey Konstantinov, Charles McCathieNevile, Chris Wilson, Brian Kardell, Tantek Çelik and others.

These leaders have made great progress on the project of the Open Web, introducing the The Extensible Web Manifesto, and taking important seats within the W3C. The Extensible Web Manifesto—which proposes lower level programing interfaces that enable web developers to iterate on abstractions in JavaScript—is gaining traction in the platform. Even just last week, the Service Workers Draft specification was published, uncovering new areas for us to build up consensus through iterative interface design and prototype conversations. The future is awesome!

This extend-the-web-forward discourse is optimal for web developers, and generally leads to better technology. The reality, however, is that we are still building interface specification consensus through traditional waterfall methods because the W3C membership is comprised of large organizations for whom this works. In order to truly make the Open Web a viable platform, we need both methods to engage both sets of stakeholders, and we need both sets of stakeholders to engage in both methods.

The specification development process is governed by the W3C Process Document. The W3C Advisory Board oversees the Process Document. If I am elected to the Advisory Board of the World Wide Web Consortium, I will work to introduce the tenets of the Extensible Web into the W3C Process and, vice versa, to introduce greater engagement with the web developer community into the W3C Process.

I began contributing to the Open Web by working on the official jQuery documentation, learning materials, and plugins before querySelectorAll. Watching the real-world jQuery use case make it into the web platform was inspiring. I got into contributing to Open Web standards at the W3C with the audio data API (and subsequently web audio) during the lead-up to the launch of Firefox 4. I have stayed involved with the W3C over the years through community groups. Most recently, I have been organizing public forums for web developers with standards groups, including panels with the W3C's TAG and ECMA's TC-39.

I have spent the last five years at Bocoup leading the company in our work helping the largest organizations in the world adopt the Open Web at the core of their businesses. It has been really incredible to work on the commercial implementation of an open platform. I have learned a lot of lessons about how to align the business value of the Open Web with its infrastructure.

This alignment is the poetry of the Open Web—the platform becomes more valuable to implementors and developers through greater discourse between them. This alignment requires the attention of platform implementors together with those developers building experiences on the platform.

If you support my bid for the W3C AB, I will work to increase that dialogue, and in so doing increase the viability of the Open Web. If you you work for a W3C member organization, I encourage you to tell your representative to vote for Lea Verou, Arthur Barstow, Virginie Galindo, David Singer, and me this year.