Where would you take the W3C?

[darobin]

Note: these are just personal notes that only represent my thoughts as an individual and not as part of the Board of Directors. Describing these as anything more established than just one person's idea is deceptive.

The W3C hasn't been doing great. The odds are that you are reading this because you care about the web, but that you are not represented there or even if you are that you feel you don't have much of a voice there. Unless you happen to work on a specific part of web standards, you likely feel that the W3C isn't relevant and you probably have no idea what's going on there.

The question I want to ask you specifically is: given the chance to fix this, what would you do? The rest of this note is mostly some thoughts I have that I would be interested in discussing. Please use this discussion and generally this repo if there is anything you would like to discuss, suggest, etc.

The week of May 8th several of the governance bodies of W3C will be meeting. Thoughts about what to discuss there are welcome too.

Why Bother?

This is a key question. Many are of the opinion that the W3C has failed or is irrelevant. If we are going to put work into fixing the W3C, we should have reasons to believe that such work will prove successful. The following reasons are why I care:

• Some parts of the technical programme are successful (eg. CSS, accessibility) and need to be preserved. When things work well it's easy to forget how much work goes into it.
• The horizontal review process that W3C has is tremendously valuable, despite almost never being celebrated or advertised. It needs to be maintained.
• There is existing infrastructure, process, community, and governance. All of these have problems but they also have value. Rebuilding from scratch would struggle to rebuild the experience and would repeat mistakes that institutional memory can help avert.

These are reasons to try reforming W3C, they aren't sufficient on their own to conclude that people who care about the web should find the W3C relevant. One interesting outcome would be for a wider community to capture what needs to change to make the W3C more broadly relevant to the web. (Much of what follows is about that.) That can inform future decisions for some communities to go separate routes or not.

Questions: Which reasons do you see to care? If you don't, what would need to change?

Stewardship: Which Future?

We can imagine two broad futures, and the W3C needs to decide which one it wants for itself:

• Stewardship of the Web: in this path, the W3C works to be the steward organisation of the web. This is what many in the W3C claim that it is doing, but for the most part does not match the practice of where the W3C is directing its energy. It would involve for instance:
  • Developing the means of being legitimately representative well beyond the current Membership.
  • Building effective governance systems for large parts of the web that are currently ungoverned or undergoverned.
  • Taking on the web's bigger problems.
• The Web SDK: in this path, the W3C focuses on just technical pieces and parts, essentially being in charge of providing an SDK for the web, primarily browser engines.

These different paths correspond to very different organisations. The former is a public-interest organisation that is intended for the broader benefit of humankind. As such, it is much more sociotechnical than just technical, and needs to be organised as such. It needs to be taking on problems to match that mission. The latter is more of a trade body for people who make browser engines or who have a strong vested interest in what happens inside a browser engine (and to some degree in a browser). That's a smaller organisation that what the W3C is today.

Having a "Web SDK" organisation isn't necessarily a bad idea, but that means that another organisation will be needed for stewardship. Notably, one difficulty is that the web's architectural integrity depends on a core set of principles that are grounded in an focus on increasing user agency. A "Web SDK" organisation would only be feasible if it accepted oversight (likely in the form of horizontal review) from a stewardship organisation. The digital space that corresponds to the web's values is worth building and its governance does not align with what territorial states can provide.

Personally, I think the choice should be the former. It is harder, but also more useful. It does however require significant change.

Questions: What is your preference? How do you see these aspirations as working together?

For Everyone: Moving Away From Membership

The W3C keeps saying that it is a Membership organisation but in many ways isn't acting like it. Some examples:

• Standards are RF, not a member benefit.
• Almost all of the work is in public.
• Substantial feedback from any person must be addressed, even if they aren't members.
• The work is grounded in principles and those take precedence over membership.
• Horizontal review works based on a subsidiarity principle that gives those groups a checks-and-balances role that is only loosely/indirectly related to membership.
• Almost all standards are now published under open, forkable document licenses.
• Invited experts, Community Groups…

This isn't to say that the Membership model doesn't have problems. Many decisions about which work gets started, who gets elected to positions of power, how Councils are formed are still tied to membership — enough to justify pay-for-play concerns. Is Membership compatible with public-interest objectives? At least a small, primarily corporate and heavily US-centric membership (~500 members, mostly companies, ~45% US).

The difficulty in moving away from Membership is funding (shifting the governance model accordingly is a much easier question). However, I think that this could be brought up with potential (public interest) funders: a W3C working directly in the public's interest, with credible governance, would be a much more credible recipient for donations — especially if it worked on the web's problems instead of ignoring most of them. (More on this below.)

One option is also to open up individual membership, at a low cost. The exact benefits would need to be mapped out, but one of them would be the use of preferenda — which only works if we can make them binding.

One benefit of individual membership would be that meaningful web communities could self-organise there. This could help avoid gatekeeping and various forms of incumbent groupthink with respect to emerging trends. The W3C's purpose, as an organisation, should be to be the convenor of the web's communities. All the communities that abide by a core set of principles and are subject to horizontal review should be allowed to organise there. The important part here might not be so much infrastructure (which is the value prop of CGs, and frankly no one under 50 wants to use email or even knows how to use it) but governance: principles, horizontal review (yes, it would need capacity — a good problem to have), patent policy, copyright handling, CoC and moderation, appeals process, community of practice…

Questions: Thoughts on Membership? What alternatives can you think of? How could representation be improved? Which communities are most excluded?

Governance > Ethics

A lot of focus over the past years has been on "ethical tech." The underlying assumption is that tech as deployed today has a deleterious effect on the world (which is correct) and that we need to make it "ethical" instead. But 1) there isn't one set of ethical values for all and 2) without an enforcement mechanism, a commitment to ethics is an entirely toothless figleaf that serves no purpose other than patting oneself on the back about being an upstanding person. Experience shows that well-meaning people excel at convincing themselves that they are working for good when they are very much cherry picking what good is simply because there is nothing to keep them in check.

The problem with tech isn't that it is unethical but rather that it is undergoverned. Power is entirely concentrated in very few hands — they'll listen to some grievances but face no checks and no balances. The problem with concentrated power isn't evil, it's incompetence and self-delusion from a lack of confrontation with reality. These issues are addressed with voice, exit, and generally by balancing out power.

Territorial states must of course have a voice, but they are not the solution to the undergovernance of planetary tech. It's on us to build the institutional capacity and mechanisms to make tech work. To fail at that is to fail as technologists.

Questions: How can W3C foster governance for key web infrastructure? How does W3C fit into and interact with other actors in the emerging planetary digital governance? How do we establish W3C as credible in a transnational context? How can we increase understanding of governance in the community?

Do Big Things

The W3C can only be relevant if it is solving problems that people care about, and it is only a steward of the web to the extent that it is working to solve the web's problems. In many ways the W3C's scope is stuck at a twenty-year-old local optimum that isn't really optimal at all.

Some thoughts about issues to tackle (some of these are partly in scope for this or that group, or — horrors — of a CG, but not really considered central):

• Social. There is intense activity around ActivityPub and Bluesky; the Social WG closed five years ago.
• Browser Commons. The only business model for browsers is to serve as muscle for hire to whoever has the money to buy a search monopoly. This is bad for search quality, bad for browser sustainability & diversity, and bad for people. We can do better.
• Capture-resistance as a STRINT-like workshop. We're clearly not good at avoiding the concentration of power, and the web is held back as a result. In the same way that we improved the Internet when we agreed that pervasive monitoring was an attack (and started working on mitigation), we'll improve the web when we agree that pervasive capture is an attack and begin work on mitigation.
• Defunding misinfo. Misinformation has always existed, but it hasn't always been a highly profitable business. On the web, misinformation (and a whole family of deleterious content under the umbrella of MFA or Made For Adversiting sites) is financially viable because of third-party cookies (and various replacement technologies that use data from one context to subsidise another). This also defunds legitimate publishers. This is a problem that can be solved.
• Search. This is a pretty essential piece of infrastructure but we have no interoperable system for it, no way to compose it, no governance over its choices despite its massive gatekeeping power, and no way to make it user-centric. In the early web, the relationship between search and publishers was mutualistic, but in the absence of a balancing mechanism it has now become predominantly parasitic: publishers have to do more and more work for less and less traffic, and their work is used to support an ad model that competes with their ad revenue.
• Money. We would benefit from the ability to compose multiple services for users, but the absence of an interoperable way to do revenue sharing makes it impossible.
• Cooperative computing. A lot is happening in P2P, federated, self-certifying models (Hypercore, SSB, libp2p, Spritely, IPFS, IPLD, UCAN, multiformats, Bluesky, etc.) that can be loosely grouped around supporting cooperative computing, collective action built from end-users rather than mediated.

These are just some thoughts (there's more, like better privacy, moderation systems, cooperation blocklist management…) — the underlying point is that the Consortium is only as relevant as the problems it tackles, and will attract people, work, and funding accordingly.

Questions: What big things would you want?

[jyasskin]

For the "Stewardship of the Web" path, we need some ideas for how the W3C can find enough leverage to make its proposals happen. We've seen what happens when the W3C starts writing specifications that implementers refuse to implement: we get the WHATWG documenting what implementers have actually agreed on. Governance requires power that voluntary standards don't, and the W3C has no experience gathering that power.

[darobin]

This is a side note but when you're a company that builds things for people on the internet, the set of standards you have to use is decided by two browser vendors, two OSs, two app stores, and one search engine. At this stage calling them "voluntary standards" is a misnomer — they're only voluntary for two companies.

I completely agree with you that it can't be "write a document and hope for the best." That wouldn't be a governance model. That said, we know a lot more than we did twenty years ago and the relevant fields have progressed in major ways. Things are still imperfect of course (eg. there are still problems we don't know how to zerochain) but there are all kinds of options on the table.

[cwilso]

This seems to be misinterpreting the term "voluntary standards". Sure, the voluntary part is whether implementers volunteer to implement those standards, or (if they WEREN'T voluntary standards) if implementers are somehow legally required to do so; as the W3C has no legal standing to force implementers to do one thing over another, it's probably a good idea to recognize that - if you believe a stronger governance model than that is necessary for the W3C over "what gets implemented in browsers", you have a lot of work to do with various governments to try to impose such rules or gain the necessary standing to make those things "requirements".

I don't think any form of better stewardship requires gaining that legal upper ground first.

[darobin]

I'm well aware of the intended meaning of "voluntary standards," I'm only pointing out that it comes with a number of implications that don't really hold in our case. Voluntary standards aren't usually understood to be voluntarily adopted by the people who write libraries for them, but also by other parts of the ecosystem, like authors. I'm only pointing out that this isn't really the world we're in.

I'm not sure that I understand your point about governments and legal upper ground. You seem to be saying that it's either governments or voluntary standards? That seems like a restricted, limiting view?

What I do know is that we can't claim to be stewards by ignoring problems, and right now we're not even pretending to care about the problems I listed. The very very strict minimum would be to document them, detail what a better situation would look like, and provide arguments for why they cannot be solved at the W3C level. This would open the door to collaboration towards fixes. I think that for several of them we can do better than that strict minimum; I don't think that we can honestly call ourselves stewards if we continue to do absolutely nothing.

[cwilso]

But they're both, in the W3C's case - though implementation experience is important, you're making it sound like authors (and other parts of the ecosystem) don't get any say at all, which seems very much not the case. (It might be said to be the case at the WHATWG, of course.). But fundamentally, the Web ecosystem has a big reliance on browser engines continuing to implement stuff; that's an unfortunate pattern to have gotten into.

FWIW, I agree quite strongly that we can't claim to be stewards by ignoring problems. I think there are a lot of us who DO ACTUALLY care about many of these problems. They SHOULD be documented, and it should be examined with an eye to what can be solved at the W3C level. (I'm a little leery of "better situation", because that implies everyone who looks at the situation would be optimizing for the same things, which is probably the core problem we have today.

[darobin]

I'm not saying that authors don't have a say in the W3C, I'm saying that the scope of the W3C is small relative to the scope of the Web, particularly of the Web's more problematic areas, and authors generally have no say whatsoever in those. I'm not sure what "authors have a say in rearranging the deck chairs" buys us that much? Sticking to notions of voluntary standards is part of what's keeping us stuck.

FWIW aligning on a better situation doesn't imply aligning on what to optimise for. Not everything is an optimisation problem :) For instance, looking at a given problem from a capture-resistance angle you can start by listing what decisions a given system makes, who is impacted by those decisions, and who should have a say about them. Then you probably have a messy set of coordination problems.

[krusynth]

I've participated with the W3 as an invited expert in the past. In general, I found the experience to be pretty negative. There was too much navel-gazing over RDF which presents a barrier to entry for newcomers. Meanwhile, the ethical issues with the technology that I brought up - with live, ongoing examples of harassment - were summarily dismissed. The whole thing felt dryly academic and very white-male centric.

I don't have an obvious solution here, but I would propose that improving diversity of participants should be a central part of these goals.

[darobin]

Yes — I can't say that your experience is atypical. Not all groups are like that, and things have improved somewhat, but it's still too much that way. Thanks for taking a moment to speak up about it.

Increasing diversity would absolutely help, but the problem is that it's a vicious circle: you're not going to get great diversity if the focus is on problems that are of concern to those in power (eg. how to make things fun, pretty, and automate inequality some more) and not on what affects everyone else. We get greater diversity when we tackle the more pressing needs of the underrepresented. I remember the first time I walked into an accessibility working group meeting and thinking "whoa, it's possible to not just have a bunch of dudes." I don't think that it's as simple as "work on meaningful issues and people will come" but I think it's a necessary condition.

If you have further thoughts about work you think should be picked up, issues that should be cared about, etc. please don't hesitate to reach out (here or directly)!

[michaelchampion]

Stewardship of the Web: in this path, the W3C works to be the steward organisation of the web. This is what many in the W3C claim that it is doing, but for the most part does not match the practice of where the W3C is directing its energy

I once thought W3C's "web SDK" work was mature, and it was time for W3C to "pivot" to become a steward of the web platform. Clearly the web platform needs better stewardship, but I have no hope it can re-boot itself into that role.

W3C succeeds when a critical mass of people share a vision of what they want to accomplish, have the knowledge and ability to do so, and leverage its infrastructure and process to create voluntary standards they can all live with. It fails when there's not actually a common vision of what's the problem to solve, there's not a critical mass of stakeholders with the power to solve it, or they see no need to work with competitors to do so.

I don't see how such a critical mass could form at W3C to invest in web stewardship. Real media company executives admit they purvey misinformation for profit (and apparently write off billions of dollars of legal consequences the cost of doing business). Entire industries depend on un-authorized tracking of personal information to improve targeted advertising. Not to mention all the intrusive monitoring done by government agencies around the world ... Even if a critical mass emerged, W3C's process gives adversaries the ability to make the collaborative work excruciating.

I don't know how effective web stewardship could be done, but I'm pretty sure it's a waste of energy to try to get it done at W3C. It may seem implausible for governments around the world to define the values guiding web stewardship, and draft technologically sound regulations to mandate it, but that's less implausible than W3C self-organizing to solve hard problems that its paying customers (aka "members") vigorously disagree about.

[darobin]

I'm less pessimistic than you are @michaelchampion, for multiple reasons.

First is that it doesn't take getting to perfect to be a steward, it requires caring, investing the effort, and making things better. We don't have a solution that makes all links resolve, all privacy perfect, everything always accessible, all languages localised at once. And yet we work on fixing and improving these. For every problem I listed there's a solution space. I believe that the W3C could be relevant in these spaces even just be producing an accurate characterisation of the problem. There's a lot to be said for just describing issues. If the W3C community is too jaded or too Crime, boy, I don't know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to work on these even at that level, then at the very least that should be documented in public. I think it's important that the W3C be clear about its scope so that others can work on the spaces that W3C doesn't plan to act on. Notably, if we are serious about the Vision given its current content then we must be starting this work — anything else would be gaslighting the community.

Second is that governments are generally keenly aware that there's a problem and don't expect to have to solve it alone. They are a lot more comfortable with industries sorting things out and providing support than I think people here realise. There is no requirement to hand things over or whatnot (I'm not even sure what that would look like). There's a whole emergent area of transnational private orderings, don't need to be stuck in "market OR state" clichés.

Finally, based on my personal experience I don't see much of a choice. The current system simply isn't sustainable, Apple+Google just extract too much money out of the system. Between app stores and ads, that's tens of percent overhead, an integral multiple of corporate tax rates. (It's no surprise that junk proliferates — it's very hard to produce anything costly under this kind of confiscatory pressure.) I see only two broad outcomes from this:

1. Apple+Google(+maybe Microsoft) complete their transformation into "cable providers" and just license content directly from publishers for distribution via proprietary platforms (including an amateur tier as exists today). No need for the web, no need for W3C.
2. Someone figures out how to break this choke-hold at sufficient scale, and high-quality, high-creativity content just flows there. The question in this branch is: is this system the web?

So for this point it boils down to:

• If we're comfortable with (1), we don't need W3C. Problem solved.
• If we want to avert (1), we need better than a "Web SDK" approach. So it's stewardship.
• If we want the web to be ready for (2), we need better than a "Web SDK" approach. So it's stewardship.

To conclude: none of this means that this work needs to happen at the W3C. But the W3C has a responsibility to choose a path rather than just sleepwalk into one. If stewardship then we should begin the work at the very least by capturing the problems. If SDK then we should tone down the vision to be about just that and let the world know that that space is open for others to take on.

[dmarti]

My wishlist answer would be: any member company that has both (1) 1 million or more EULA-accepting users of a Web client and (2) 1 million or more ToS-accepting users of an online service (Web or other) should have to break itself up and rejoin as two independent members, a client company and a service company. That's probably not possible for W3C to require today, but would give a lot more people a lot more incentives to address the problems you mention, so just putting it out there as a stretch goal.

In the short term, a productive project would be to compare the W3C "Antitrust and Competition Guidance" ( https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2017/antitrust-guidance ) to similar policies at other organizations. For example, W3C and the Linux Foundation have members in common, and LF's policy is: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/antitrust-policy Is there a more productive way to address competition issues than what we're seeing currently? That would probably help with recruiting more smaller companies—and organizations or individuals that are the intended victims of anti-competitive collusion—as members.

[tarkowski]

Hi Robin,

I've read your longer essay on W3C and wanted to respond, from the perspective of someone with very little experience of W3C, but with a good understanding of its potential role, and the importance of standards. I have three ideas:

• All standards governance bodies face a participation gap. You describe it in detail with regard to W3C. This recent piece takes a critical look at European standard setting bodies: https://www.ceps.eu/with-the-ai-act-we-need-to-mind-the-standards-gap/. There is therefore a need for a coordinated, collective effort to build participation in bodies like W3C. The way civil society advocacy works (and taking into account the demands of such engagement), this will be possible only with dedicated funding to support such participation, with coordination across a broad range of organizations. I am assuming that it is civil society organizations that could provide the core capacities, with support of academics and experts.

• I really like your ideas about the need to bridge technical / standards discussions and advocacy / legislative conversations. Especially that, in my experience with civil society advocacy work, public interest advocates often face the same challenge (but from its other side): they are deeply engaged in legal / regulatory debate, but don't have the experience or resources to follow the standard-setting ones. And the big picture is that of combined governance through code and law. This connects with the previous issue.

• The last point I want to make is from a broader perspective, and it might be out of scope for what makes sense in the context of today's W3C. There is a big need to build governance not just of standards / protocols, but on top of them. I have been following closely the developments around Mastodon, where there is not just the issue of governing the protocol (your raise the issue of the dormant Social WG) - there is also a need to build gocernance of this federated space. A space where governance seems to be defined today in terms of cooperation among instance admins, in the spirit of open-source, and around maintenance of instances. This is a very weak, and technology driven, vision of governance of a distributed, federated social networking spacee. There is a need to establish governance, on top of the protocol, for example on issues broadly related to content moderation. Though the term might be too narrow - in my organization, we like to think in terms of a digital public space, or the commons - both terms offer holistic views of these spaces, and the governance needed.

looking at this from a different angle: Another recent example is Bluesky, a social network with an open but private protocol at its heart. This is a network that, again, should have better governance of both the protocol, and the socio-technical structures that emerge around them. On Bluesky right now, there is common talk of "community", but that concept easily becomes meaningless at web scale (at Mastodon's millions of users, and even more so at billions of users of dominant, corporate networks). Yet we do need "communities" of some sort, if we want to have democratic, participatory governance - because it needs to be built around some form of representation of social groups / aggregates (which we can call "communities"). This is the limitation of thinking in terms of content moderation: it is focused on dealing with individual harms (or those of well-defined communities like minority groups), rather than on governance of collective rights and systemic issues (that can be framed as a digital public space). These new "communities" need to be conceptualized, defined, and then governance should be established on their behalf. Since there is little clarity how to do that, and few anchor points, I'm thinking that W3C, as a "steward for the web", would be as good a starting point as any - to at least explore these issues.

[darobin]

Hi Alek!

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reach out! My thinking has evolved some since that piece (but overall I remain aligned with the general ideas). A few quick notes:

• I completely agree with you on the funding part. I would like to get the W3C at a level of credible governance that is sufficient for some entities to contribute funds and trust that they will be distributed properly. (I also have some farther-fetched ideas about forms of taxation, but that's for another day ;) The IPFS community has been experimenting with a system in which active participants (some form of NomCom) can nominate people/projects deserving of support and then vote on which ones deserve funding (with now-classic quadratic voting). It's not perfect yet, but I think it has potential. The Arcological folks have been doing some good work in that area (I have hope for the private retrieval fund). I think that this could be coupled with individual membership, too.

• We experimented with tech/policy bridging with GPC. It's a pretty simple mechanism so a good testbed. The jury's still out on how successful it will eventually be, but I think it's a good start. Many lawyers (of the boomer privacy variety) were very confused, and aligning on details was at times tricky (different views of how versioning works in practice, explaining enforcement to computer people…) but I don't think that there was a major roadblock. It's more that it's a set of muscles that need to be built.

• I couldn't agree more with your third point. I don't think that it's out of scope for W3C. A lot of what I'm seeing in the Fediverse matches what you're seeing: I would describe it as operating mostly on norms rather than rules (from an institutional perspective). While things are small and largely voluntary, you can just rely on norms. I won't do a bad thing because I want to be part of the community and I don't want you to think I'm a jerk. But as the group grows and people's livelihoods become involved, you need to switch to enforcement that is stronger than disapproval and ostracism. I might still not want you to think that I'm a jerk, but I also need to make a living and since everyone is racing to the bottom I'll do that too and explain away your disagreement as impractical idealism. We really lack a good understanding of how to make that transition, how to build successful enforceable governance, how to layer it, etc. CoMo is one example (we have that problem in the DDC WG) and there are so many more!

I've been meaning to schedule an online get-together of a few people around the idea of "a governance layer for the Internet" (meaning to be filled in). Would you be interested? The way I think about it, the W3C ought to be a component in such a thing (and to be more relevant it should strive to become a leading convener of such a thing), but the scope is wider.

[tarkowski]

Hi Robin, Apologies for a slow reply, I was travelling last year. On your first point, it’s interesting how governance norms in the web3 space accept, to a much greater degree, some formalisation, like voting. THis can be compared with classical “Web1” civic projects like Wikipedia, where participatory governance has very basic / insufficient forms. And yes, I would be very happy to continue this conversation at an online get-together.

…

-- Director of Strategy, Open Future | openfuture.eu | +48 889 660 444 At Open Future, we tackle the Paradox of Open: paradox.openfuture.eu/

On 17 May 2023, at 16:16, Robin Berjon ***@***.***> wrote: Hi Alek! Thanks a lot for taking the time to reach out! My thinking has evolved some since that piece (but overall I remain aligned with the general ideas). A few quick notes: I completely agree with you on the funding part. I would like to get the W3C at a level of credible governance that is sufficient for some entities to contribute funds and trust that they will be distributed properly. (I also have some farther-fetched ideas about forms of taxation, but that's for another day ;) The IPFS community has been experimenting with a system in which active participants (some form of NomCom) can nominate people/projects deserving of support and then vote on which ones deserve funding (with now-classic quadratic voting). It's not perfect yet, but I think it has potential. The Arcological <https://arcological.xyz/> folks have been doing some good work in that area (I have hope for the private retrieval fund). I think that this could be coupled with individual membership, too. We experimented with tech/policy bridging with GPC. It's a pretty simple mechanism so a good testbed. The jury's still out on how successful it will eventually be, but I think it's a good start. Many lawyers (of the boomer privacy variety) were very confused, and aligning on details was at times tricky (different views of how versioning works in practice, explaining enforcement to computer people…) but I don't think that there was a major roadblock. It's more that it's a set of muscles that need to be built. I couldn't agree more with your third point. I don't think that it's out of scope for W3C. A lot of what I'm seeing in the Fediverse matches what you're seeing: I would describe it as operating mostly on norms rather than rules (from an institutional perspective). While things are small and largely voluntary, you can just rely on norms. I won't do a bad thing because I want to be part of the community and I don't want you to think I'm a jerk. But as the group grows and people's livelihoods become involved, you need to switch to enforcement that is stronger than disapproval and ostracism. I might still not want you to think that I'm a jerk, but I also need to make a living and since everyone is racing to the bottom I'll do that too and explain away your disagreement as impractical idealism. We really lack a good understanding of how to make that transition, how to build successful enforceable governance, how to layer it, etc. CoMo is one example (we have that problem in the DDC WG <https://github.com/DDC-WG>) and there are so many more! I've been meaning to schedule an online get-together of a few people around the idea of "a governance layer for the Internet" (meaning to be filled in). Would you be interested? The way I think about it, the W3C ought to be a component in such a thing (and to be more relevant it should strive to become a leading convener of such a thing), but the scope is wider. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAERH3UNRDRRJHVAUCFVYMDXGUW3DANCNFSM6AAAAAAXUVWQEQ>. You are receiving this because you commented.