Call me cynical, but unless the W3C attempts to address their deficiencies in terms of accountability, unless they are prepared to address the fact that their primary standards-evangelization tool (their validator) is chronically underfunded and run by volunteers despite the multi-million dollar funding for the W3C from corporate Members, unless stakeholders such as those same volunteers who built the validator gain even a semblance of a say over the W3C's activities, then why should I be inclined to donate?

Then why should I be inclined to donate?

Well, based on all of that above, I surely wouldn't be inclined. :(

I've been using those validators for years. I don't mind donating to the cause. I could care less about all the politics. Those validators have been running strong for many years. And they continue to improve upon them. I use the /referer method so I'm using some of their bandwidth daily.

encyclo, this donation drive is an effort to fund the validator and staff it adequately.

I started the validator as a developer tool for people working on HTML specifications, but people increasingly rely on it in developing web content; they expect it to "just work" and they expect friendly tech support and so on, not just "here's the source; patches welcome!" This is a somewhat different service than what our members pay their fees to get, so we're looking for funding directly from the community that relies on it (though there is some overlap).

I'd like to know more about the "deficiencies in terms of accountability" that you see. I think money has a lot less influence than you might think. It's much more a case of "he who does the work makes the rules." W3C welcomes both volunteers and people who do this stuff as their day job.

Consider the W3C patent policy. When W3C started a patent policy working group, naturally big companies with billions of dollars in annual patent license revenue joined the working group. But so did the FSF. Early drafts of the patent policy weren't as strongly Royalty-Free as many of us liked, but like all other W3C working groups, that group was obliged to publish early and often and to take into account public feedback. We got over 2000 comments
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Oct/thread.html ) and we read every single one. And today the W3C patent
policy is more supportive of independent open source developers than any other standards development organization's policy.

How do you think W3C could improve in accountability? Who do you think does it better? I'm confident ISO is no friend of independent web developers. W3C, OASIS, and IETF are similar enough that each is better and worse than the others in some ways; we tend to borrow the best from each other; there's more variation between groups in each of those organizations than there is between the organizations themselves. I like to watch the wikipedia governance discussions; that's a fascinating organization.

I'm not sure donations are the best way to fund the validator, but there's no better way to find out than to try it, right?

I'm particularly interested to connect validator development back to the specification development process. For too long, there has been a chicken-and-egg situation: "we can't use new attributes because the validator doesn't support them" vs "we can't add new attributes to the validator because the validator team only has bandwidth to deal with finished Recommendations, and those new attributes aren't standard yet."

I think the whole thing works best when there's an appropriate amount of feedback between the community using the validator and the Working Group developing the specifications.

If people don't trust W3C to be responsive, of course they'll take their time, money, and effort elsewhere. I'd like to think that whatever W3C did to lose your trust has mostly been fixed or is in the process of being fixed. If you don't think so, I'd like to hear more.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld DanC!

Would this be you?

Dan Connolly
Research Scientist, MIT/CSAIL
[w3.org...]

I Heart Validator

I'll be promoting the Validator Donation Program. I've been a long time proponent of the W3 and its service to Webmasters around the world.

Thank you for joining us!

P.S. One of these days the other 99% of the Webmasters will catch on. :)

yes, that's me. I gave my email address, connolly@w3.org, in my profile.

OpenId support would be nice; my homepage is also my OpenId.

Welcome to the forums, Dan, your comments are much appreciated. My first issue in terms of accountability is that there appears to be no real way for volunteers, users or contributors to become recognized stake-holders - I understand your point that the W3C reads the comments from the public, but that is a far cry from having a formal role. Members are organizations and companies only, with four and five-figure annual fees for membership, an expense that most web design shops and independent developers could not possibly justify. So one can volunteer, but with no vote, no formal role, members only of the peanut gallery and distant from the stage.

My criticisms, of course, are in no way meant to diminish the vital work that the validator team has done to provide an extremely valuable tool for web development. But my initial reaction is to question why this important work is not properly funded as a core activity of the W3C.

Very often, newbie web developers are introduced to the importance of standards by members of blogs or forums such as these, by members and standards-advocates such as pageoneresults and myself. The W3C validator is our first recommendation to fixing problems with their markup and CSS. The fact that such a vital marketing tool for the W3C is left underfunded and under-staffed is symptomatic of the gap between the interests of the Members and the role that the W3C should be playing in the wider community.

You, the validator developers, deserve much, much more from the W3C, and I find it unfortunate that you need to get out the begging bowl when you should be at the forefront of standards advocacy instead, seeking participation not in financial terms, but in terms of spreading the message of the advantages of web standards.