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The World Wide Web Consortium achieves its mission by bringing diverse stake-holders together, under a clear and effective consensus-based process to develop high-quality standards based on contributions from the Membership, Team, Offices, and public.

W3C Membership

The W3C Members ensure the strength and direction of the Consortium through investment and active participation in W3C Activities. See also how to join W3C. W3C has over 400 Member organizations from more than 40 countries (Figure 1), with a broad range of interests (Figure 2). In 2005, W3C instituted a number of changes to its fee structure to encourage participation from organizations in developing countries.

Figure 1: W3C Membership distribution by country (larger version, SVG version, text description)

W3C Members include vendors of technology products and services, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments, all of whom work to reach consensus on a direction for the Web.

Figure 2: W3C Membership distribution by commercial sector (larger version, SVG version, text description)

W3C Team

W3C Communications Team working with Advisory Board representative

The W3C Team (Team photo) includes more than sixty researchers and engineers from around the world who lead the technical Activities at W3C and manage the operations of the Consortium. Most of the Team works physically at the three host institutions: MIT/CSAIL in the United States, ERCIM headquarters in France, and Keio University in Japan. See the Contact page for W3C Hosts.

Led by the Director (Tim Berners-Lee), the Chief Executive Officer, and a Management Team, the W3C staff:

• Provides direction to W3C by keeping up to date on new technology, market fluctuations, and the activities of related organizations;
• Coordinates W3C Activities so as to optimize the achievement of goals within practical constraints (such as resources available);
• Promotes cooperation between Members while promoting innovation, seeking a diverse Membership, and facilitating active participation;
• Communicates W3C results to the Members and the press, and promotes their acceptance in the Web community; see the list of public presentations by the Team.

W3C Offices

The mission of the W3C Offices is to work with regional communities to promote adoption of W3C Recommendations among developers, application builders, and standards setters, and to encourage inclusion of stakeholder organizations in the creation of future recommendations by joining W3C. You can contact the Offices in these regions: Australia, Benelux, Brazil, China, Finland, Germany and Austria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Korea, Morocco, Southern Africa, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom and Ireland.

Public Accountability and Participation in W3C

Because of the growing importance of the Web to so many people in so many aspects of their lives, it is critical that W3C engage the broader public as part of the development of the core Web standards and that W3C be accountable to this public audience. W3C enables public participation and promotes public accountabilitly in a number of ways. We encourage the public to:

• Participate in technical discussions on one of W3C's many public mailing lists. The W3C Process ensures that Working Groups give full consideration of public feedback on specifications.
• Participate in a W3C Workshop, a chance to brainstorm with people about topics that interest the community but may not yet be on the agenda of a chartered W3C group.
• Review group charters in review by the W3C Membership. These are charters for proposed work; they are public during review by the W3C Membership. While W3C welcomes public comments, we cannot guarantee a response to all such comments, unless they are made in a formal review by a W3C Member organization.
• Contribute to W3C open source software. Early implementation of new technology in open source makes a huge difference to the market, to the credibility of the technology, and to the ability of people anywhere, in commercial or academic labs or at home, to build on each step by experimenting with the next. Implementations of W3C Candidate Recommendations can provide W3C with very valuable feedback.
• Translate a technical report. W3C benefits from a large and faithful number of volunteer translators, who help to increase the impact of W3C Recommendations. More than forty languages are used on the W3C Web site. Contribute to the list of translations of technical reports, and find out how to volunteer and collaborate with other translators. In 2005, W3C also initiated a policy for authorized W3C translations.
• Participate in a Working Group as an Invited Expert. If you have a high level of expertise in a specific field which is being addressed by a current W3C Working Group, you may ask the Chair to invite you to participate, even if you do not work for a Member organization.

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