Hi, I’m Tantek Çelik and I’m running for the W3C Advisory Board (AB) to help continue transitioning W3C to a community-led, values-driven, and more effective organization. I have been participating in and contributing to W3C groups and specifications for over 25 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 advanced the movement to offer open licensing of W3C standards, and make it more responsive to the needs of independent websites and open source implementers.

At the same time 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 social web implementations.

In my most recent AB terms I led the AB’s Priority Project for an updated W3C Vision, drove consensus in issues & meetings, and submitted & reviewed pull requests to advance our Vision draft.

Environmental sustainability is a global concern, and the impacts of technologies, services, and standards are important for W3C to consider in all of its work, as the TAG has summarized in the W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles. To raise the importance of sustainability (s12y) at W3C, last year I established the W3C Sustainability Community Group, and subsequently organized interested participants at TPAC 2022 into asynchronous work areas, such as working on Sustainability Horizontal Reviews.

The next two years of the Advisory Board are a critical transition period, and will require experienced & active AB members to 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 believe governance of W3C, and advising thereof, is most effectively done by those who have the experience of actively working in W3C working groups on specifications, and especially those who directly use & create on the web using W3C standards. This direct connection to the actual work of the web and W3C is essential to prioritizing the purpose & scope of governance thereof.

I post on my personal site tantek.com. You may follow my posts there or from Mastodon: @tantek.com@tantek.com.

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.

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. This statement is also published publicly on my blog.