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.

Most recently, I’ve focused on the efforts to clarify and operationalize W3C’s core values, and campaigned to add Sustainability to W3C’s Horizontal Reviews in alignment with the TAG’s Ethical Web Principles. I established the Sustainability Community Group and helped organize interested participants at TPAC 2022 into asynchronous work areas.

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.