Hi Duncan, On 20 Aug 2013, at 02:42, Duncan Bayne <[email protected]> wrote:
> Rather, I was claiming that the richer, more prominent members of the > W3C seem to have a disproportionate influence in such scope decisions. As someone who has spent 15 years in the community, in various roles (volunteer, staff, member rep) I'm afraid you are making a couple of significant mistake about how people and organisations gain influence in W3C decisions. Participating in conversations are a core part of the W3C, and they are key to reaching consensus - the main modus operandum of the organisation. That said, the main way a person or organisation gains *influence* in the W3C is by: 1. Putting boots on the ground: committing time and effort to draft specs, propose solutions, submit tests, etc. 2. Implementing the specs. Ideally in a compliant, interoperable way. Think of it as a variant of the "rough consensus and running code" of other standard organisations. This, by the way, is the reason behind the (frustrating) answers opponents of EME have been receiving from the rest of the community. Complaining about a technology doesn't really work at the W3C (minus, indeed, formal objections at some points in the W3C process). What works are specs (hence the suggestion to "come up with a better solution") and implementations (hence the notion that "work on EME will happen anyway" so it's best to have it happen here so the community can give input). Like it or not, that's how the W3C works… Admittedly, it does make it much easier to make something in scope (get a few members to commit to work on a spec and implement it) than out of scope (object, and hope that your concerns are heard). Back to the question of "richer, more prominent members"… Of course there is a correlation between "being a large/rich member" and "influence". Such member companies, by virtue of their size are more likely to have the resources available to send to working groups, which is how they will build influence on tech that matters to them. Conversely, members paying the full fee are more likely to *want* to send representation in groups to get a return on their investment, and they tend to be implementors or at least have a serious business stake in the technology. So you won't see a lot of full members with little influence - because they would either not bother joining, or drop off quickly for lack of ROI. But correlation does not mean causation - some full members are happy monitoring most of the W3C's work rather than influencing it, and some non-profits on lower membership tiers have massive influence because they are implementors (e.g Mozilla). HTH, Olivier
