Duncan, (as usual read once everything before replying) Le 9 janv. 2014 à 14:42, Duncan Bayne <[email protected]> a écrit : > Crisis of representation, again.
Hmm it depends on how you imagine the goal of a representation. The mission of W3C is to work on technologies and *propose* something aka create something. A crisis of representation would be in the context of W3C, the lack of categories of stakeholders (be community, companies, individuals) with a valuable input to create the technology. W3C doesn't create policies for the external world. > As many including myself have observed, the voices of some members seem to > carry more weight than others. This is false if you are talking about money. :) The "bias" we can witness at W3C is at least three folds: * Hacker ethics: Commit or shut up. (which I find personally not healthy for a society) * Silent people: People not participating make a lot of room for others. But you can't really force others to care. Not all Members joined because they wanted to actively participate (unfortunately) * Time: There are people being paid for it or just having time (some students, even rich people ; there's one case) who can contribute more than others so because of the hacker ethics, they will influence the work. So basically it's not the quotation on stock market which defines the influence at W3C, but more the people who invest time into achieving their goals and pushing their agenda. And indeed it can take sometimes a lot of resources. > In particular, more weight than the billions of people throughout the world > who derive great benefit from the Open Web, with the W3C as its champion. This is difficult to answer in the sense we could do the same assertions about many things in the world (think clean water, electricity, etc) with economic interests and battles which are far nastier than the ones we have at W3C. > I'll grant you, things have been rocky in the past. > The issue of patents required a very vocal public campaign to ensure the W3C > remained true to its principles, and DRM is shaping up the same way. Yes! The vocal public campaign was partly to enlarge the representation to people who could propose something, not create a void. The work made by the patent policy WG has been to change the RAND policy to the RF policy, not just let's remove the RAND. I think that's the important point and where we are failing currently as a community for those like you and me who want mechanisms not tied to DRMs. It's where we need to put the effort. Not to solve the issues of Hollywood, but to propose systems which are good for the Web and the creators of content. The battle is that not that many content producers (even in the Indie world) are asking for another system to distribute their creation. Maybe we could/should do something on this side. For example, CreativeCommons is not anymore a W3C Member but should join at least this community group. They are closer to the creators. > JF and others will tell you that it's a done deal. It isn't - at least no > more than patents were a decade ago. They will smear their opponents as > communists (I'm not), anti capitalists (ditto) or fantasists (this battle has > been fought and won once before). huh? :) to this last paragraph. You could be anarchist, communist, whatever, it is not related to the discussion. Plus it introduces something which is very american in the discussion. I don't think it's good to go this way ;) -- Karl Dubost 🐄 http://www.la-grange.net/karl/
