© Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 1996
This conference was held to discuss the benefits of participation by Australian organisations in the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the possibility of an Australian host-site for W3C.
The event was organised by Liddy Neville of RMIT, and financial assistance was provided by DIST and DOCA (the Commonwealth Departments of Industry, Science & Tourism, and of Communications & the Arts).
The event commenced with a brief presentation by the Director of W3C (and originator of the web), Tim Berners-Lee, participating by video-link from Boston, followed by a longer one by Jim Miller supported by Philip DesAutels, also from Boston, but participating on-site. This was followed by a succession of panel sessions which involved semi-prepared brief presentations, propositions and questions from individuals representing diverse interests and viewpoints. A moderate amount of involvement from the audience was achieved.
The participants (numbering about 100 across the day) appeared to be primarily representative of the academic and cultural communities, together with some people who could be reasonably represented as small web-related businesses and their representatives, and some from government, but very few from 'big business'.
This document is a personal summary of the event, and has no official standing of any kind whatsoever. Material arising from the Conference are to appear progressively at HOTLINK
W3C is a consortium of organisations, currently numbering about 150 and currently comprising almost entirely I.T. providers. Its purpose might be expressed (very simply and entirely unofficially) as being:
to protect and exploit the world's investment in the world-wide web.
It does this through:
Its activities include:
Note that all of this is a personal (and doubtless somewhat misleading!) interpretation. For W3C's own expression, start at HOTLINK.
Members of the W3C Consortium have some limited rights to influence the agenda and resource-allocation of the W3C staff, and to gain early access to documents and software. However the purpose of the Consortium is to affect the entire web-world, and all documents which have a long-term life (such as draft standards) are published 'free-to-air' after a short period.
W3C is headquartered at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). A European host-site is provided by INRIA (roughly speaking, the equivalent of Germany's GMD, and CSIRO's Division of Information Technology). In September 1996, Keio University in Tokyo was announced as the host-site for "Japan and Korea". The W3C organisation has about 35 staff at present, funded partly from member subscriptions and partly by secondment of staff from member organisations. A great deal of the standards-drafting process, however, is undertaken by member-corporations.
Jim Miller identified the following as being the next things that can be expected to be delivered or to emerge:
Challenges and opportunities that Jim identified included:
In general terms, members gain through the opportunity for participation, and early warning of developments and standards.
Organisations have the option of being a Full Member in return for a commitment of $US50,000 p.a. for three years. Organisations smaller than $50 million turnover have the option of being Affiliate Members, in return for a commitment of $US5,000 p.a. for three years. The rights of Full and Affiliate Members are essentially identical.
Individual organisations participate in the following events:
There is scope for Australia to benefit through the trickle-down effect of a sufficient number of local organisations taking up W3C membership.
There is also considerable benefit from events being held in Australia, such as this Conference, the annual AusWeb and the W3C World Conference (in Brisbane in 1998). They provide a focal point in time and space for many, diverse organisations and individuals.
The further opportunity exists for a 'W3C host-site' to be established in Australia. This would provide a physical locus around which projects could be conceived and undertaken, and through which people could pass.
The pre-requisites for an Australian W3C host-site appear to be:
Jim Miller suggested that areas in which he perceived Australia to have a potential advantage were:
- content (presumably such things as animation and art history databases);
- collaborative tools in social spaces; and
- low-speed connection.
There is an argument, however, (in part put by Jim Miller) to the effect that a physical locus for projects is not the key issue, because W3C projects are inevitably conducted in virtual space. That, of course, raises the question as to whether MIT, INRIA and Keio University value the presence of W3C on their sites, and whether co-location of staff-members for at least some of the time is beneficial, even necessary.
Any Australian organisation can become a Full Member or Affiliate Member. This is the case whether or not a host-site is ever established in this country.
Any organisation that joins W3C can drive an initiative to create a standard, or implement a demonstrator. This can be done alone, or in association with other organisations locally or overseas. To be accepted by W3C as an official activity, it would need to satisfy content, quality and resourcing expectations.
A further approach would be to participate in a project to establish a W3C host-site in Australia. Jim Miller's rough guide was that a project involving 1 equivalent full-time staff-member within W3C, plus resources provided by Members, requires about 5 Full Members or about 50 Affiliate Members, i.e. $US250,000 p.a.. This might be established on a national basis, or through a functional grouping of, say, museums throughout the world.
A session over a 'brownbag' lunch addressed a range of matters that might be grouped as 'social issues', including cultural, commercial, regional, isolationary, multi-lingual, gender, etc. The Chair noted a theme of 'enabling difference'.
Ilana Snyder provided a gently sceptical 'future retrospective' on developments in access to 'knowledge', and expressed concern about the web as a "crowded but lonely" space of technology and advertising, rather than a public, cultural space.
Another pleasant-and-pertinent aphorism was offered by Mike Grant (and attributed to Terry Cutler), who suggested that the focus of the web was not 'networking technology', but 'networking people through technology'.
Jason Romney commented very positively about the AusWeb Conference's policy of pre-publishing conference papers on the web, enabling pre-conference consideration and discussions.
I injected the point that the scope of the web encompasses both community and its driver, motivation, on the one hand, and business and its driver, incentive, on the other. The need is for means of either marrying or at least achieving co-existence, or quarantining, these 'two cultures' of the late 1990s.
The W3C constitution and membership agreements provide very substantial power to the Director Tim Berners-Lee. There is no direct link between the Advisory Committee of members' representatives and project selection and resource allocation. To a very considerable extent, the undertaking is dependent on the continued goodwill and good judgement of Tim, the maintenance of the vision in the face of various pressures, and the articulation of the vision through a relatively small number of key people and a large number of corporations.
The day was valuable. W3C appears to have established itself, and is a credible broker and co-ordinator of standards development. Many challenges exist, particularly tensions among members who are, 'in real life', head-to-head competitors, and at the interface forwards from W3C to the official standards-approving and -issuing organisations. But the dream has certainly not died, and the Consortium has achieved credibility as a forum for service conception and standards-design processes.
Australia may choose to do what it usually does, i.e. very little in a co-ordinated fashion, and a modest amount (in international terms) through individual organisations.
Australia could, alternatively, adopt the strategy of moderately targeted or niche work, by proposing to W3C that one or more projects be undertaken here, without actually establishing a host-site.
Finally, Australia has the option of identifying a host-site for W3C as being a strategic initiative at national level. Melbourne is emerging as host to a substantial number of related initiatives (including eMerge, the Australian Electronic Business Centre, ESD, Netscape, Sun and Sausage Software). It could be that the Commonwealth and Victorian Governments may be interested in playing a role, in such ways as providing establishment and/or infrastructure funding, and stimulating a group of Australian companies to provide the critical mass necessary for a host-site to be established.
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Last Amended: 23 October 1996
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