Philippe Le Hégaret

Employment History

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Sophia Antipolis, France (at the French National Institute For Research In Computer Science And Control), 1999

Cambridge, MA, USA (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 2000 - 2022

Wakefield, MA, USA, January 2023 - present

Strategy and Project Management Lead (2023 – present)

Responsible for ensuring that we are developing the right collection of specifications to achieve W3C’s mission.

• Identification of new work
  • Identifying major new directions and new core capabilities.
  • Proposing and running Workshops as necessary to ensure the right new charters are drafted.
  • Identifying work essential to sustaining "Web for all" as Web technologies evolve, and/or as W3C technology topics expand.
  • Tracking Community Groups and Business Groups to identify new areas.
  • Tracking innovative new ideas coming from the Research community or open source community.
  • Maintaining Liaisons with organizations that might influence leading-edge work.
• Prioritization and structure of work
  • Prioritizing needs. Take the lead in “Zero-based budgeting”. Decide which groups to wind down or stop.
  • Driving technical design discussions that are necessary to clarify the scope and general direction of a Working Group.
  • Proposing modifications of the W3C Process as it relates to the agility of the technical development process.
  • Proposing restructuring of Working Groups to better meet the needs of the Web.

Project Management Lead (2016 – 2022)

Focuses on meeting all of the milestones of all of the groups, facilitating the work of Team Contacts, Chairs, and Editors to ensure that the work is moving forward appropriately, and driving the work necessary to achieve operational success.

• Ensuring timely planning to extend or revise (or expeditiously terminate) Charters as appropriate. This function has primary responsibility for extended or revised Charters, handling comments and objections, making incremental modifications, and working with Strategy management to (a) include fundamentally new requirements and (b) negotiate appropriate level of Team Contact support.
• Responsibility for operational excellence throughout the Chartered period for all Working Groups.
• Driving detailed technical design discussions of the form necessary to make forward progress on the chartered work
• Managing Chair training

Domain Leader, Interaction Domain (2008 – 2015)

Lead W3C Interaction Domain, containing 8 Activities (Graphics, HTML, Internationalization, Math, Rich Web Client, Style, Video in the Web, XForms, Fonts, Web Testing)

• Responsible for W3C's general direction regarding all Domain Activities.
• Identify Web community's technical interests regarding Web Applications.
• Coordinate Activities with other W3C Domains and with external bodies (i.e. IETF).
• Create, monitor, and close Working Groups as needed. Work with member companies to define scope and recruit participants. Achieve cross-industry consensus on all points.
• Serve as primary contact for all questions concerning Domain Activities, including those related to W3C Patent Policy and W3C Process.
• Promote the use of W3C technologies via presentations, conferences, workshops.
• Provide press interviews and hold final approval of any press releases concerning the Domain.
• Report annually to all member companies and the Advisory Board (via their participation in the W3C Advisory Committee) regarding current status and future plans of all Domain Activities.

Manage Interaction Team

• Supervise 11 individuals (located across US, Japan, China, and Europe).
• Assign individuals' time to meet working group needs.
• Provide direction and priority level concerning technical issues.
• Facilitate and conduct staff meetings as needed.
• Resolve personnel issues.  Conduct annual reviews.
• Decide level of W3C Domain presence at various conferences.  Approve travel budgets, presentations.

Serve on the W3C Management team

• Participate in W3C management meetings at all levels, operational through long-term vision.
• Contribute to policies concerning W3C Team, Membership, and other areas.
• Represent W3C at industry conferences.
• Serve as W3C contact to the IETF (2006 – present).
• Participate in Member recruiting and outreach.

Domain Leader, Architecture Domain (2003 – 2008)

Lead W3C Architecture Domain, containing 5 Activities (Extensible Markup Language (XML), Web Services, Document Object Model (DOM), Internationalization, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI))

• Responsible for W3C's general direction regarding all Domain Activities.
• Identify Web community's technical interests regarding Web Architecture.
• Coordinate Activities with other W3C Domains and with external bodies (i.e. IETF).
• Create, monitor, and close Working Groups as needed. Work with member companies to define scope and recruit participants. Achieve cross-industry consensus on all points.
• Serve as primary contact for all questions concerning Domain Activities, including those related to W3C Patent Policy and W3C Process.
• Promote the use of W3C technologies via presentations, conferences, workshops.
• Organize public workshops: Video on the Web (2007), Web of Services for Enterprise Computing (2007), XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences and Interoperability (2005), Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services (2004).
• Provide press interviews and hold final approval of any press releases concerning the Domain.
• Report semi-annually to all member companies (via their participation in the W3C Advisory Committee) regarding current status and future plans of all Domain Activities.

Chair of, Team Contact for W3C Working Groups, Coordination Groups (1999 – present)

Coordination Group — formed of Chairs of all Working Groups within one Activity. Provides forum in which to facilitate communication across Working Groups.

Working Group — formed of representatives from Member companies plus a W3C Team Contact.  Provides forum for negotiation regarding a specific technology.  Final deliverable is an industry-wide specification.

Chair Of:

• Process Community Group (co-Chair, 2023 – present)
• Web Services Coordination Group (2006 – 2008)
• DOM Working Group (2001 – 2003)
• Also, as Chair of the DOM Working Group, participated in the HyperText Coordination Group (2001 – 2003) and in the XML Coordination Group (2001 – 2003)

As Chair:

• Schedule deliverables, set milestones towards completion of deliverables.
• Define meeting agendas.  Judge items in- or out-of-scope for discussion according to Group Charter.
• Encourage participation.  Resolve dissension.
• Solicit technical drafts. Appoint document editors.
• Ensure compliance with W3C Process.

Team Contact for:

• Distributed Tracing Working Group (Team Contact, 2023 – present)
• Pointer Events Working Group (Team Contact, 2018 – present)
• HTML Media Extensions Working Group (Team Contact, 2013 – 2018) (2019 Emmy® Award)
• Web Performance (Team Contact, 2010 – 2020)
• Timed Text (Team Contact, 2010 – 2016) (2016 Emmy® Award)
• DOM (Team Contact, 2000 – 2004, Alternate Team Contact, 1999)
• Web Services Description (Team Contact, 2002 – 2016)
• Web Services Addressing (Team Contact, 2006 – 1016)
• Web Services Policy (Alternate Team Contact, 2006 – present)
• XML Core (Alternate Team Contact, 2005 – 2016)
• SMIL (Alternate Team Contact, 1999)

As Team Contact:

• Represent W3C Director's technical view within the Working Group.
• Communicate between participants of Working Group and W3C Team, between Working Group and Membership at large, and between Working Group and public (including the press).
• Develop expert knowledge of technical requirements and of various Member stances and motivations.
• Maintain awareness of general Web architecture as evolving in other W3C work.

Specification Editor (2000 – 2004)

• Document Object Model Level 3 Core Specification (2004)
• Component Extension API (CX) requirements (2001)
• Document Object Model Level 2 Core Specification (2000)
• Document Object Model Level 2 Style Specification (2000)
• SAC: Simple API for CSS  (2000)

Developer (1997(intern), 1999 – 2003)

• Developed CSS Validator.
• Contributed to development of CSS2 specification.
• Produced reusable CSS2 parser conforming to SAC (Simple API for CSS).
• Participated in development of DOM Level 2 and Level 3 APIs.

Dyade/BULL

Sophia Antipolis, France (at the French National Institute For Research In Computer Science And Control)

Intern - Applied Research (1998)

• Won 1998 R&D Award from Bull for creating Koala Object Markup Language (KOML), a language to serialize Java objects in XML.
• Promoted use of XML inside Bull; conducted presentations.
• Used Java to write one of the first XML 1.0 parsers.

Education

Master of Sciences, Computer Science and Engineering Sciences — University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (1998)

• Extensive independent work related to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Bachelor of Sciences, Computer Science - University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (1997)