Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help it reboot W3C as a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 24 years.
I am Mozilla’s Advisory Committee (AC) representative and have previously served on the AB for several terms, starting in 2013. In the early years I helped lead the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers. In my most recent term I led the AB’s Priority Project for an updated W3C Vision. I set the example of a consensus-based work-mode of summarizing & providing granular proposed resolutions to issues, presenting these to the AB at the August 2022 Berlin meeting, and making edits to the W3C Vision according to consensus.
I co-chaired the W3C Social Web Working Group that produced several widely interoperably deployed Social Web Standards, most notably the ActivityPub specification, which has received renewed attention as the technology behind Mastodon and other implementations growing an open decentralized alternative to proprietary social media networks such as Twitter. ActivityPub was but one of seven W3C Recommendations produced by the Social Web Working Group, six of which are widely adopted by implementations & their users, five of those with still functional test suites today, almost five years later.
The next 6-18 months of the Advisory Board are going to be a critical transition period, and will require experienced AB members to actively work in coordination with the TAG and the Board of Directors to establish new models and procedures for sustainable community-driven leadership and governance of W3C.
I have Mozilla’s financial support to spend my time pursuing these goals, and ask for your support to build the broad consensus required to achieve them.
You can follow my posts directly from my tantek.com feed or from Mastodon with: @tantek.com@tantek.com
If you have any questions or want to chat about the W3C Advisory Board, Values & Vision, or anything else W3C related, please reach out by email: tantek at mozilla.com. Thank you for your consideration.
Yesterday I ran the Spartan Turkey Trot #5k #race in 41:42 @SpartanTurkey5k. First #turkeyTrot in a while that I ran/jogged/walked. #turkeyTrot2022
Arrived early like last year for a warm-up. Alternated run/walk sessions for ~10min then jogged back to the track start area. Got my bib, pinned it on, used the bathroom, and kept warming up with back/forth strides next to the track. Saw niece & nephew2 start in wave 1, kept warming up. Decided to start with my dad in wave 3.
Had to use the bathroom one more time, and by the time I got out, wave 3 was already off. Got stuck waiting in wave 4 (walkers & strollers). Made my way to the start then ran without pacing myself to catch my dad. Found him and decided that I’d rather stay with him and keep him company. Ran/jogged/walked the rest of the race, eventually returning to the high school track. We ran the back straight through the finish arch.
Because if you’re going to be mathsci-nerdy about dates, why associate with made-up month lengths? And "3/14" is US-centric. UK/EU can’t have 31/4 — no April 31st.
is enough for Mastodon users to search for and follow that @tantek.com@tantek.com username. Took a little more work to setup Bridgy Fed to push new posts to followers.
Note by the way both the redundancy & awkwardness (it’s not a clickable URL) of such @-@ (AT-AT) usernames when you’re already using your own domain.
Why can’t Mastodon follow a username of “@tantek.com”? Or just “tantek.com”? And either way expanding it internally if need be to the AT-AT syntax.
Why this regression from what we had with classic feed readers where a domain was enough to discover & follow a feed?
Also, why does following show a blank result?
Contrast that with classic feed readers which immediately show you the most recent items in a feed you subscribed to.
Lastly (for now), I asked around and no one knew of a simple public way to “preview” or “validate” that @tantek.com@tantek.com actually “worked”. You have to be *logged-in* to a Mastodon instance and search for a username to check to see if it works.
Contrast that with https://validator.w3.org/feed/ which you can use without any log-in to validate your classic feed file.
Why these regressions from the days of feed readers?
This was my second ultra race finish, and sixth ultra-distance run. Since last year’s Rodeo Valley 30k (https://tantek.com/t5E81), I signed-up for seven races, started six, and finished five (including this one). I’m behind on a year of race posting so for now here’s a mini-report and story of a 50k in 10 photos.
Mini race-report: decent fueling, very good hydration, hottest race I’ve ever run, first time using ice in a neck buff & under my cap, left knee-pain (IT band) struggle in the last 7-8mi, had to fast-walk the last 4mi. Thankful for Vivek Gowri crewing me at the Skyline Gate aid station (17.2mi) making sure I had/got what I needed (no sunburns!), Amanda’s so thoughtful mini cheer sign (📷5) she snuck into my dropbag, and the two of them plus David Tran for running me in the last mile-ish which helped push me to a sub-9h30m time. Thanks also to Bryan Ting for both recommending this race to me and being at so many spots on the course to take race photos. Seeing friends along the way turned a hot & hard race into a fun time.
Photos in time order:
📷2: There’s a certain calm in the ritual of arranging all your race gear & fuel the night before. This was my second race where I packed a drop bag, with extra water & gels I might need if temperatures rose higher, or I took longer than expected. Having trained with nearly everything in that pile at some point, and run the course trails over a couple of days a few weeks beforehand, I went to bed knowing I was prepared.
📷3 by Bryan: Knowing I’d be close to the course limit, I opted for the early start option, an hour before the normal start, just ineligible for any competitive medals. It was dark when we arrived, but you can see how much it lightened up (even with cloud cover) for the 6am early start.
📷1 by Bryan: I kept a steady pace up to the second aid station, stopping only briefly at mile 4 to use the bathroom at the golf course next to the first aid station which wasn’t set up yet. Right before the second aid station, Bryan Ting was camped out taking race photos, and captured me focused on my run.
📷5: From there on it was steady work making it up and down various trails as it warmed up in the first half of the race. Made it up to the Skyline Gate station where Vivek was waiting with my drop bag, and handed me a surprise race sign card that Amanda had made for me.
📷6 by Vivek: It was 85F+ at Skyline Gate, so I sat for a few minutes and took time to calmly hydrate some more. I grabbed a couple of spare gels from my drop bag, and after Vivek helped me re-apply sunscreen, I stood for a moment before jumping back on the trails.
📷7 by Bryan: The push up to the last aid station was a tough hike in the open sun. I saw Bryan again taking photos and focused on a steady run-shuffle up the trail.
📷8 by Vivek: Vivek, David Tran, and Amanda found me on the paved path around Lake Chabot with ~1.5mi to go and captured my determined struggle. Plenty of energy left, I was more annoyed by the pace-limiting knee-pain that started in mile 25 and became too painful to run at mile 28. They chatted with me to keep me distrated, and told me I looked good (amazing how much that helps). I kept a steady fast-walk, gently run-shuffling on the rolling downhills as pictured.
📷9 by David Tran: Running ahead, David took photos & video of me. With the finish area in sight, I swung my arms and pushed past the knee-pain into a run, first on the remaining asphalt then across the lawn through the orange cones toward the finish.
📷4 by Bryan: Stopping my watch as I lept over the finish line, eyes on the finisher’s medal offered by a volunteer. Happiness and relief as I completed my first ultramarathon race since 2019.
📷10 by Bryan: @ScenaPerform’s Skyline 50k brought friends & community together like no other race since @TheNorthFaceECS races. A bunch of us 50k finishers recalled our adventures during the race while rehydrating & snacking on Impossible burgers at the finish area picnic. Bryan saw us gathered and we lined up for a group photo which perfectly captured the moment.
This year’s W3C TPAC Plenary Day was a combination of the first ever
AC
open session in the early morning, and breakout sessions in the late morning and afternoon.
Nick Doty
proposed a
breakout session for Sustainability for the Web and W3C
which he & I volunteered to co-chair, as co-chairs of the
Sustainability (s12y) CG
which we
created on Earth Day
earlier this year.
Nick & I met during a break on Wednesday afternoon and made plans for how we would run the session as a Sustainability CG meeting, which topics to introduce, how to deal with unproductive participation if any, and how to focus the latter part of the session into follow-up actions.
We agreed that our primary role as chairs should be facilitation. We determined a few key meeting goals, in particular to help participants:
Avoid/minimize any trolling or fallacy arguments
(based on experience from 2021)
Learn who is interested in which sustainability topics & work areas
Determine clusters of similar, related, and overlapping sustainability topics
Focus on prioritizing actual sustainability work rather than process mechanics
Encourage active collaboration in work areas (like a do-ocracy)
The session went better than I expected. The small meeting room was packed with ~20 participants, with a few more joining us on Zoom (which thankfully worked without any issues, thanks to the W3C staff for setting that up so all we had to do as chairs was push a button to start the meeting!).
I am grateful for everyone’s participation and more importantly the shared sense of collaboration, teamwork, and frank urgency.
It was great to meet & connect in-person, and see everyone on video who took time out of their days across timezones to join us. There was a lot of eagerness in participation, and Nick & I did our best to give everyone who wanted to speak time to contribute (the IRC bot Zakim's two minute speaker timer feature helped).
It was one of the more hopeful meetings I participated in all week. Thanks to
Yoav Weiss
for scribing
the minutes.
Here are a few of the highlights.
Session Introduction
Nick introduced himself and proposed topics of discussion for
our breakout session.
How we can apply sustainbility to web standards
Goals we could work on as a community
Consider metrics to enable other measures to take effect
Measure the impact of the W3C meetings themselves
Working mode and how we talk about sustainability in W3C
Horizontal reviews
I introduced myself and my role at Mozilla as one our
Environmental Champions,
and noted that it’s been three years since we had the chance to meet in person at TPAC. Since then many of us who participate at W3C have recognized the urgency of sustainability, especially as underscored by
recent IPCC reports. From the past few years of publications & discussions:
2022 W3C member-only Advisory Committee (AC) meeting panel on
Sustainability at W3C (W3C Member-only link)
For our TPAC 2022 session, I asked that we proceed with the assumption of sustainability as a principle, and that if folks came to argue with that, that they should raise an
issue with the TAG,
not this meeting.
In the Call for Participation in the Sustainability Community Group,
we highlighted both developing a W3C practice of Sustainability (s12y) Horizontal Review (similar to
a11y,
i18n,
privacy, security) as
proposed at TPAC 2021,
and an overall venue for participants to discuss all aspects of sustainability with respect to web technologies present & future. For our limited meeting time, I asked participants to share how they want to have the biggest impact on sustainability at W3C, with the web in general, and actively prioritize our work accordingly.
Work Areas, Groups, Resources
Everyone took turns introducing themselves and expressing which aspects of sustainability were important to them, noting any particular background or applicable expertise, as well as which other W3C groups they are participating in, as opportunities for liaison and collaboration. Several clusters of interest emerged:
Technologies to reduce energy usage
W3C meetings and operations
Measurement
System Effects
Horizontal Review
Principles
The following W3C Groups were noted which are either already working on sustainability related efforts or would be good for collaboration, and except for the TAG, had a group co-chair in the meeting!
I proposed adding a liaisons section to our
public Sustainability wiki page accordingly explicitly listing these groups and specific items for collaboration.
Participants also shared the following links to additional efforts & resources:
Noting that since all our work on sustainability is built on a lot of public work by others, the best chance of our work having an impact is to also do it publicly, I proposed that Sustainability CG work in public by default, as well as sustainability work at W3C in general, and that we send that request to the
AB to advise W3C accordingly. The proposal was strongly supported with no opposition.
Active Interest From Organizations
There were a number of organizations whose representatives indicated that they are committed to making a positive impact on the environment, and would like to work on efforts accordingly in the Sustainability CG, or would at least see if they could contact experts at their organizations to see if any of them were interested in contributing.
Igalia
mesur.io
Mozilla
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Washington Post
Meeting Wrap-up And Next Steps
We finished up the meeting with participants signing up to work on each of the work areas (clusters of interest noted above) that they were personally interested in working on. This has been captured on our wiki:
W3C Wiki: Sustainability Work Areas.
The weekend after the meeting I wrote up an email summary of the meeting & next steps and sent it directly to those who were present at the meeting, encouraging them to
Join the Sustainability Community Group (requires a
W3C account)
for future emails and updates. Nick & I are also on the W3C Community Slack #sustainability channel which I recommended joining. Signup link:
https://www.w3.org/slack-w3ccommunity-invite
Next Steps: we encouraged everyone who signed up for a Work Area to reach out to each other directly and determine their preferred work mode, including in which venue they’d like to do the work, whether in the Sustainability CG, another CG, or somewhere else. We noted that work on sustainable development & design of web sites in particular should be done directly with the
Sustainable Web Design CG (sustyweb), “a community group dedicated to creating sustainable websites”.
Some possibilities for work modes that Work Area participants can use:
W3C Community Slack #sustainability channel
public-sustainability email list of the Sustainability CG
There is lots of work to do across many different areas for sustainability & the web, and for technology as a whole, which lends itself to small groups working in parallel. Nick & I want to help facilitate those that have the interest, energy, and initiative to do so. We are available to help Work Area participants pick a work mode & venue that will best meet their needs and help them get started on their projects.
Rephrased from what I shared in some private discussions earlier this week:
I think "support" may inadvertently convey a stronger meaning than what we intend a lot of the time. Similarly "oppose".
One thing that other browsers explicitly look for are "positive signals" or absence of "negative signals", so I think it may be better to directly use such terms, e.g.
"positive", "neutral", "negative"
More:
In my opinion this also reads better for evaluations of proposals which in their current state have more disadvantages than advantages, we can mark them "negative" without completely discouraging someone with "oppose" which sounds more like something we’d actively fight.
Similarly, a lot of the time we don’t want to say "Mozilla supports X" if we think something has promise but has lots of holes to fill in or other problems. Such an expression may have the unintended consequence of discouraging (or deprioritizing) active work on the issues we file for such holes/problems. Also "support" is an overloaded term, that I’d expect broader audiences to possibly misinterpret as indicative of product plans.
I believe "positive, neutral, negative" will more accurately convey what we mean than current labels, with less chance of misinterpretation (whether intentional or not) than the alternatives.
↳ In reply to issue 6 of GitHub project “AB-public”This is another “to-do list” issue that is open-ended and requires someone to go through a bunch of somewhat lengthy existing discussions elsewhere to try to extract specific proposals for improvement, similar in that regards to https://github.com/w3c/AB-public/issues/2 except that was primarily about extracting from a curated pre-existing crafted text, and this issue is more of an amalgam of a bunch of lists of things from several authors, some of which are already handled in the Vision.
Proposed resolution: * defer this issue and leave it open to specific proposals (in new issues) for inclusion of any relevant specific points & content from the those old discussions. If there are no specific proposals by end of year 2022, close this issue without changes, noting that new issues for specific points may still be raised, yet due to lack of interest, no one is being assigned to attempt to extract specific points from other people’s lists made in GitHub comments. I.e. if folks feel strongly about specific points in their lists, it is their responsibility to file new specific issues for each point they feel strongly about.
↳ In reply to issue 5 of GitHub project “AB-public”Original issue both has some points and may be requesting more detail than is appropriate for a Vision document.
Per the one response on the original issue, I’m not sure how to adequately address this issue either, except to perhaps consider linking to more detailed documents regarding “good of its users” and “safe for its users”, though I’m not certain enough about that approach to propose resolving in that manner. That is, this issue may merit some additional time and thoughtful consideration to come up with ways to address the points the original issue creator brought up.
Proposed resolution: * keep this issue open to asynchronous discussion til the end of the year 2022. If it hasn’t made progress by then, consider linking the phrases “good of its users” and “safe for its users” to other related documents at W3C such as the TAG Ethical Web Principles https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/ethical-web-principles/
Alternatively, if the AB deems that consideration (just linking those phrases to the TAG Ethical Web Principles) sufficient now, I would be ok with making edits to the Vision accordingly and closing the issue.
↳ In reply to issue 4 of GitHub project “AB-public”Original issue had one response pushing back on how this was attempted in crafting the Vision but essentially did not work in practice.
Having worked on the Vision myself and seeing firsthand that combining principles related to the web and W3C in one document provides important context, and improves understanding & collective sense-making, I agree with the pushback.
As there was no follow-up response (for nearly 3 months), and I don’t think this is worth pursuing:
Proposed resolution: * close this issue without changes, as addressed by the response in the original issue and this follow-up comment.
Proposed resolutions: * Add “and public feedback” to the end of the first point “Provide an open forum…” * Change “Ensure that standards are developed” to “Ensure that standards are openly developed”, perhaps defining “openly developed” in the Glossary per https://github.com/w3c/AB-public/issues/1 which could note that “openly developed” means publicly viewable discussion notes, proposals, issues, drafts, test suites, implementation reports, decisions, and conflict resolutions. * Add “for the public at large” after “… address evolving use cases”
There was a side comment in prior discussion of this issue to also consider updating other pages about mission, principles, and vision, such as: * https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission However, “updating [other] existing pages” is off-topic for this specific issue, which is about updating the Vision document in particular.
Proposed resolutions: * defer this issue and leave it open to specific proposals (in new issues) for inclusion of any relevant content from the old “7 points” document. If there are no specific proposals from the suggested old “7 points” document by end of year 2022, close this issue without changes. * create a separate new issue for “Update w3.org/Consortium/mission to align with updated Vision”
↳ In reply to issue 1 of GitHub project “AB-public”Proposed resolution: accept & resolve this issue: there was no objection in prior discussion, and it will help make the Vision more understandable to a broader audience, while helping it stay succinct which helps keep the Vision more accessible to a broader audience.
Proposed next steps to close this issue: * create a Glossary file as a peer to the Vision document * stub it (explicitly) with scope (the Vision document) and one or a few obvious jargon terms from the Vision (e.g. “phishing”) with anchors * link to Glossary from the footer of the Vision document * link from the first occurence of a jargon term in the Vision to the specific term in the Glossary * add a “How to contribute” footer to Glossary encouraging proposed additions to grow the Glossary as necessary to define additional jargon terms in the Vision with broadly accepted uses & definitions within the W3C community, perhaps encouraging singular pull requests for terms that may require in depth discussion such as “centralization” or are otherwise contentious in actual practical use in W3C discussions.
Ran my 10th #BayToBreakers in 1:38:32 on Sunday, apparently 3 seconds faster than the most recent in 2019, again the day after an @SFRunCo Saturday trail #run, and a double-day Friday.
For Create Day, I added code to my publishing system to only syndicate (POSSE) a reply post to Twitter if it actually has an @-name, otherwise if it’s a peer-to-peer reply, just directly send them a Webmention.
“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than your ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.” — Why The Lucky Stiff
