2024 TPAC Plenary Session

Welcome comments.

After some discussion with members we decided to have a small plenary rather than a completely separate AC update.

Quick agenda items

First, updates from TAG chairs and team leads regarding key technical topics of the day and recent or soon-to-come events.

Second I'll provide some corporate updates on our finances, team, and some preliminary results of our Membership survey

And last I'll close out with updates on the BoD election

While we have so many folks gathered here heads down in WGs this week it seems like a good opportunity to bring you all together to cover key technical initiatives, concerns, and ongoing work as highlighted by TAG and team.

TAG continues its program of design review, and also continues working on findings, design principles and other documents to support people who are building new technologies for the web.

Ethical web principles - our first formal statement. This is an important aspect of what we do and helps align our work with our mission, vision, and values. And it underpins the TAG’s design principles and other technical work.

The population of online users continues to grow rapidly, becoming more essential to the lives of so many. This creates more desire and opportunity to put the web to misuse, deliberately or not. So, the question is how does the web help ensure that people aren’t flooded with disinformation and misinformation that they are unable to distinguish from authentic information?

Per our ethical web principles.

This is a key concern to all of us as technologists, standards developers, and web users. It’s also a significant challenge as the web, collectively, is a massive target. We had several related sessions at AC in April.

While there are many positive uses of various forms of AI, I want to briefly highlight several threats it poses to users of the Web, particularly with respect to notions of security and privacy.

It’s also not the only source of new threats to web equilibrium and our principles, but captures many key concerns.

First, we have active discussions around how AI and the web intersect, so please join the conversation if interested.

Leonard Rosenthol of Adobe presented on C2PA at the AC conference in April. A project whose mission is to develop technical specifications that can establish content provenance and authenticity at scale to give publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of media Efforts aligned with some of W3C principles and work.

Building on the work of W3Cs Text & Data Mining CG. There was a breakout on Wednesday on Authenticity and the web focusing on organizing a workshop on this topic for next year.

Digital Identities have been in development for decades. As governments increasingly consider becoming providers and consumers of these technologies, they more than ever have the potential to change the Web and the concept of identity as we know it. Given the scope and scale of this innovation, digital identities are significantly impacting the web and, in particular, privacy, altering the assumptions and the balance that have shaped its ecosystem.

Simone Onofri is the editor of an excellent document on Identity and the web, looking at both the market and human side and sharing our understanding of current and expected impact of developments linked ot identity.

There’s a very recent draft report published by the Web Platform Incubator CG on digital credentials that talks about an API to enable user agents to mediate access to, and presentation of, digital credentials such as a driver's license, government-issued identification card.

There’s a draft Federated Identity WG charter in process to develop specifications that enable users to authenticate an identity or present a credential or set of claims, in a way that is compatible with other protocols and is supportive of user security, privacy and agency.

Safely enabling these identity-related interactions requires new mechanisms mediated by the user agent that allow individuals to select identity information relevant to a given interaction, such as assertions, credentials, or specific attributes.

These mechanisms must also be viable for issuers, identity providers, verifiers, and relying parties to exchange information as securely and privately as possible, while supporting an open ecosystem. While protocols and formats are being developed elsewhere (e.g., ISO, IETF, OIDF, and other W3C Groups), the Web platform layer must also be standardized to provide a secure and privacy-preserving API framework that is agnostic to and compatible with different identity request/response protocols and formats.

Digging deeper into the work on Government Identity - using DLs, passports etc. Signed credential for government use. What if a government / agency website could access your signed credentials, biometrics etc. to support asserting your own identity in a government transaction.

This requires both identity security for you and a user agent that can discern if the requestor is the agency that they say they are. Mutual verification of identity and provenance.

This also raises questions of Privacy.

In the government id validation scenario, we need to enable targeted, controlled access to our identity (data minimization principle). A dual national might want to choose which identity to present. Or if you’re providing ID to buy alcohol, do they need to pull your home address off of your ID?

As we develop government and other IDs, we need to embrace the privacy principle of keeping people at the center of transactions involving their personal data.

The TAG has recently released their recommendation on third-party cookies. I think a key aspect of this is finding the balance between current expectations from web users, particularly ones that improve user experience and making sure that user privacy is respected. They suggest a replacement approach using technologies that are designed-for-purpose to meet these two points.

FedCM provides a good example of this.

There’s also an important notion that APIs and solutions may have minimal risk individually, but we need to be thoughtful in ensuring that in combination they can’t be used for purposes that contradict our privacy principles.

The TAG has put our Privacy Principles through the Statement process. This document starts off by defining what we mean by privacy on the web - so that we’re all on the same page - and then outlines privacy-specific design principles for spec authors, user agent developers and web developers.

With this, the resumption of movement on privacy related WG charters, and the appointment of Tara Whalen, we are poised to work hard on this area that is crucial for all of us.

Other horizontal updates

Quick i18n update: While there is no big headline on this front, we continue to do the important work of layout requirements and other support for languages and scripts. In the recent months, we have published layout requirements for 35 scripts, continuing our goal to analyze and fill the gaps in the support of languages from around the world. This includes additional support for scripts like Lao, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, and Devanagari.

We are in the process of submitting WCAG 2.2 to ISO. This is an important step as there are several countries that can adopt ISO standards but not directly work with W3C standards.

We are planning publication of WCAG2ICT for WCAG2.2 in October. This will address how to apply WCAG to mobile apps, documents, software, and other information and communication technologies (ICT). This will help support organizations that are using WCAG in meeting regulations in the US, Europe and elsewhere.

AI and Accessibility — W3C's Research Question Task Force of the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group is documenting opportunities and issues with accessibility of machine learning and generative AI.

Accessibility focus with staffing — In addition to continuing to support Working Group priorities, we are positioning to deliver on W3C Inc's broader mission. With additional staff, we can supplement the work of volunteer Editors to progress standards work faster. We can also excel at mission-critical aspects such as providing high-quality translations of W3C accessibility resources and tools to support organizations in meeting their accessibility goals.

TAG to continue focus to help ensure advanced APIs are designed to get adoption across multiple implementors, meaning advanced API developers should avoid the temptation of browser-dependent web apps. There are important features to be developed here, but our community should be aware of how to work on these in a Webby way, meaning without throwing out the goodness of the web (open, interoperable, privacy/horizontals for all) in the process.

All of these together demonstrate why our horizontal viewpoints and review concept are important. If you have thoughts on these subjects, are interested in getting involved, or want to better understand how the work you’re doing in whichever groups you’re involved in interact with these key topics, I encourage you to follow the links in this deck, reach out to the team members I’ve mentioned, etc.

TAG election!! Start thinking now about who you can put forward for this election. More candidates results in bettermore outcomes. Diversity is important in this. Start talking and thinking now. We want TAG to reflect the diversity of the web community as best as we can. Questions about being in the TAG, talk to Dan or anyone. 4 seats. TAG works to accommodate scheduling etc. in any way possible. In addition, TAG are running a breakout on Wednesday seeking to get feedback on design reviews and other outputs.

Overall we are financially healthy. Recently published a more detailed report to membership. Hitting high points here

member fee growth slightly higher than projected. conservative hiring early in the year reduced expenses. this event is our largest expense, so we tend to build surplus prior to this

Op reserves: how long we can run if we stopped receiving any income. 6 months is benchmark. Program expense, a measure of how much of every dollar we take in is spent on meaningful work (as opposed to admin). 75% is a typical target. Increasing importance with 501c3 status.

Audit, 2022 complete, 2023 in flight. So far proceeding well. Will internally have preliminary reports on both in October, will lead to final audited numbers through 2023.

Current budgeted revenue for '25 is conservative. Expenses up per growth in '24. Operating reserves will remain strong.

New team members, please stand up!

Starting to invest more in member relations and engagement, bringing on Tzviya to build out the North American framework. Hopefully many of you have had a chance to chat with her! The goal is to create closer relationships and community, similar to other regions of the world. As part of that, we put together a task force and their first action was to survey you all.

Survey: 824 mail addresses 2) W3C homepage 3) W3C social medias 4) W3C homepage banner.

many new particpants!

More to come. Thank you to all who participated - your voices matter!

Notes to be written day of when known. Thanks to all who ran. Making this kind of commitment is important and we all appreciate the effort required to run.

Notes to be written day of when known. Mark N., Robin B., David S.

Pulling off an event like this isn't easy and takes a lot of work.

Moving on to the formal part of our W3C @ 30 celebration. Logistics when known. Chris, a long long time part of W3C, part of the web, will be hosting this for us.