The Center for Democracy & Technology, a long-time civil society member of the W3C, is pleased to nominate Nick Doty for election to the Advisory Board.

What is the W3C Advisory Board and this election?

W3C's Advisory Board provides guidance to the W3C Inc. Team, manages the Process for standard-setting, and helps to resolve conflicts among members and standard-setting participants. The Advisory Board is elected by W3C Member organizations. This special election, with four open seats to serve for at least the next six months, was precipitated by the transition to a separate legal entity, W3C Inc., and the election of a Board of Directors to manage that organization, including four people previously serving on the Advisory Board. I blogged previously about the different governance changes at W3C.

Nominations and statements are available and voting by W3C Member organizations runs through 14 January 2023. If you are affiliated with a W3C Member organization, please remind your Advisory Committee representative to vote by ranking several candidates for the open positions.

Diversity and inclusion are of particular importance in these governance bodies for the technical standards that affect users of technology around the world; please make that a priority in your voting. For this election, many dedicated volunteers have stepped up to offer their service; that's great news for a community-driven organization.

Nomination statement from Nick Doty

My career has focused on building privacy and human rights into the standards of the Web and the Internet. As a graduate student, I began contributing privacy reviews of Web standards in 2010, starting with the Geolocation API (see our report on Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API). I subsequently worked for the W3C Team on privacy, including forming the Privacy Interest Group (PING) and editing specifications in the Tracking Protection Working Group. At UC Berkeley's School of Information, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on enacting privacy in the technical standard-setting process. And I'm now a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology, advocating for human rights support in Internet architecture, in areas like advertising, encryption and messaging. At W3C, I co-chair PING, serve on the Privacy Principles Task Force, and identify and fix privacy and human rights concerns in as many community and working groups as I can.

W3C's process, and internet governance generally, is most effective and legitimate when it is genuinely multistakeholder. (The Internet Society has a good overview of the multistakeholder approach to Internet governance.) W3C's governance should include more of civil society, in addition to industry, academia and government, and we must extend further outreach to include more of the world that is affected by our work. I would like to help the Advisory Board to seek user perspectives, to invite a wider range of members including more user advocates, and to make our practices more welcoming to a diverse, world-wide community.

In order to rely more on the community rather than the Director for the standards process, we need to more formally encode the fundamental values that make up our vision for the Web and to more effectively resolve conflict and process objections. I would seek to continue the Consortium's progress here, not just in areas where W3C has extensive experience with horizontal review (including accessibility, internationalization and privacy), but also in considering sustainability, disinformation and free expression.

The transitions to a new legal entity and a community-led process represent an important moment for W3C and our community. I would be honored to serve on the Advisory Board, and will continue to advocate for inclusivity and human rights in Web standards.