Last week I participated @W3.org (@w3c@w3c.social) #W3CAC (W3C Advisory Committee¹), #W3CAB (W3C Advisory Board² @ab@w3c.social), and #W3CBoard³ meetings in Hiroshima, Japan.

The W3C Process⁴ describes the twice a year AC (Advisory Committee) Meetings⁵. In addition to members of the AC (one primary and one alternate per W3C Member Organization), the meetings are open to the AB (Advisory Board), the Board of the W3C Corporation, the #w3cTAG (W3C Technical Architecture Group⁶ @tag@w3c.social), Working Group⁷ chairs, Chapter⁸ staff, and this time also a W3C Invited Expert designated observer⁹.

The AC currently meets in the Spring on its own and a shorter meeting in the Fall as part of the annual #W3CTPAC (W3C Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee¹⁰ meetings). The existence, dates, and location of the event are public¹¹, however the agenda, minutes, and registrants are generally Member-confidential. Since those individual links have their own access controls, I collected them on a publicly-viewable wiki page for easier discovery & navigation (if you work for a W3C Member Organization¹²):

* https://www.w3.org/wiki/AC/Meetings#2024_Spring

Most of the W3C meeting materials and discussions were also W3C Member-confidential, however a several of the presentations are publicly viewable, and a few more may be shared publicly after the fact.

Myself and others at #W3C who believe in pushing for more openness and transparency in standards work, even (or especially) governance of said work, will be doing our best to work with others at W3C to continue shifting our work accordingly.

Aside: I started the #OpenAB project when I was first elected to the AB (Advisory Board) in 2013, documenting it on the publicly viewable W3C Wiki, and updated it with the help of others since: https://www.w3.org/wiki/AB#Open_AB

Like most conferences, I got as much out of side conversations at breaks (AKA hallway track¹³) and meals as I did from scheduled talks and panels.

For now, here are the events, slides, and videos which are publicly viewable that provide an interesting glimpse into some of the topics discussed:
* 📄 report: https://www.w3.org/reports/ai-web-impact/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/engaging-the-members/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/exploration/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/OHCHR.pdf
* ▶️ video 5m42s: https://customer-0kix77mxh2zzzae0.cloudflarestream.com/9ad1e01b20d9b15d413f02c0ada3fe34/watch
* ▶️ video 4m16s: https://customer-0kix77mxh2zzzae0.cloudflarestream.com/1bfde2bf614d7535b8a775217a949974/watch
* 🗓 event: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/13213a52-8159-4af8-b939-38c7880ba266/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/lt-deepfake/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/lt-accessing-llms-data/
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/pac-data-sovereignty/ (nice #IndieWeb mention)
* 🖼 slides: https://www.w3.org/2024/Talks/ac-slides/intro-content-credentials.pdf
* 🖼 slides: https://w3c.github.io/adapt/presentations/ac2024/ Warning: the proposed use of .well-known therein is IMO a bad mistake. Unnecessary reinvention (most handled by existing rel values¹⁴), more complex to author (requires sidefiles¹⁵), harder to publish (requires site admin root access), likely to become inaccurate (Ruby’s postulate¹⁶), and fragile (site admins frequently break .well-known for individual pages). A full critique likely requires its own blog post.
* 🗓 event: https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/df0b9dd8-2356-47ec-839d-eadc06da1ca1/

I’ll update this list with additional resources as they are made publicly viewable.

If you work for a W3C Member Organization you can view the full list of resources linked from the Member-confidential agenda: https://www.w3.org/2024/04/AC/ac-agenda.html#monday

References:

¹ https://w3.org/wiki/AC
² https://w3.org/wiki/AB
³ https://w3.org/wiki/Board
⁴ https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/
⁵ https://www.w3.org/2023/Process-20231103/#ACMeetings
⁶ https://w3.org/tag
⁷ https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/
⁸ https://chapters.w3.org/
⁹ https://www.w3.org/invited-experts/#ac-observer
¹⁰ https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC
¹¹ https://www.w3.org/events/ac/2024/ac-2024/
¹² https://www.w3.org/membership/list/
¹³ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hallway_track
¹⁴ https://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values
¹⁵ https://indieweb.org/sidefile-antipattern
¹⁶ https://intertwingly.net/slides/2004/devcon/68.html