5 Cool Ways to Support the W3C
Jens Meiert, January 21, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
To overcome the “spring fever” kind of thing currently suspected on this and other sites, let’s have a look at some random things currently popping up, and get proactive. I recently got a mail by someone interested in supporting the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), similar to what I do, and while replying I noticed that the information I was about to share might not always be obvious yet indeed important, as the W3C fulfills a crucial role and can surely always use bright contributors, too (as opposed to pseudo-standardistas).
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Become a W3C supporter. If you just like to throw money at the W3C, that’s the way to go. Either become a W3C supporter or donate something for the validators. I’ve been doing both.
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Contribute on W3C mailing lists. Many if not most of the W3C lists are public, and you don’t just have the pleasure to learn on a fairly high level (well, there sometimes are rude, impolite, off-topic, useless mails too, just like on other lists) but a great place to share your expertise as well. So pick and subscribe to some lists of your choice. And meet me on at least a dozen of them.
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Become a W3C translator. You don’t have to go for official or authorized translations in order to become a W3C translator and make important technical documentation accessible to non-English tongues. Translating W3C documents is great pro bono work, so please go ahead, volunteer and subscribe to the W3C translators list. And you name it, I love that kind of contribution and will most likely continue providing translations until the end of time.
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Become a Working Group member. Maybe becoming a W3C WG member is way too simple, as you just have to get a public account and apply (yes) for becoming an Invited Expert. For the HTML Working Group, that albeit intentionally simple process resulted in quite a few of aforementioned “pseudo-standardistas”, however it’s a good thing to commit and contribute to W3C activities. Fair enough, me, I’ve been a more or (more often than enough) less contributing member of the WCAG and HTML Working Groups.
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Implement W3C specifications. I’m out of the game from here, but maybe that’s something for you: Since the W3C process may require implementations to make a specification a Proposed Recommendation or even official Recommendation, these are all the more really important to accelerate adoption and use on the Web. So that’s just another option you have to avoid complaining but instead being proactive, for the W3C and the Web.
There are a some alternative ways to contribute, but I’ll leave that to both our friends at the W3C as well as all valued readers to share.
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Comments
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On January 27, 2009, 12:49 CET, Alan Gresley said:
I think acknowledgment would help. I have been acknowledged by Anne K. for my assistance with the CSS selector API. The leader for Firefox development Rob G. was talking about me behind my back on a W3C list. It seems my occurrence in the thread was about my troll like nature which was seen as very unproductive. It was my talk about browser implementers working together for the common good of the web. But the cake must go to Microsoft. You wouldn’t know via the IE blog that I created many test cases to show how shocking IE7 was.
Anyway. I do believe that Ingo Chao and Bruno Fassino should be acknowledged and accepted as peers of the CSS WG.
The problems of the web or W3C survival will never be fixed when the multinationals that have voting rights at the W3C don’t give more money.
