Elena Lape

AB Meet the Candidates Responses

What priorities should the AB take on in the next year? How will you help accomplish them?

To get a clearer picture, I conducted a survey leading up to the election, asking AC reps to evaluate certain aspects of their interactions with W3C. By doing so, I wanted to make sure that I didn't just pitch what I believed W3C should prioritize, but that my campaign priorities reflected the voice of the W3C membership and the community.

Based on the 62 survey responses, we have three main problems to solve, and thus priorities to focus on:

Simplify the way W3C presents information. W3C has an abundance of information, but it’s very scattered and siloed. Members struggle to find what they need, which can be frustrating and inefficient. According to the survey, 54.8% of respondents felt that W3C’s information is somewhat clear and easy to find, while 30.6% disagreed entirely.
Advocate for quicker, more effective processes. Decisions take too long here. We need to adopt more efficient methods to move from discussions to actionable decisions. This means streamlining processes and cutting down on bureaucratic delays. The survey indicated that 56.4% of respondents are only partially satisfied with the speed of decision-making, and 17.7% were not at all satisfied.
Improve diversity. By this, I mean we need to involve the entire web community, including smaller companies, freelancers, and underrepresented groups. Everyone should have a voice in the web's future. Almost two-thirds of survey respondents agree that broader groups should be more represented in W3C activities and governance.

I will help the AB to accomplish these through establishing data-driven processes, and using my experience running developer-focused businesses. I've built communities of thousands, and my passion for developers and developer communities drives me.

The AB positions are unpaid but require regular meetings at inconvenient times/locations, preparation for said meetings, and collaboration with people you might disagree with. Why do you personally wish to take this on?

All of these things — contributing without compensation, attending meetings at 2 AM, collaborating with others — are things I am already doing. I run developer communities for fun, and I got into open source and hackathons because I enjoyed working with others. I don’t work in a big corporation where at least some of my activities at W3C would be part of my working hours and/or compensation package.

All of this is a testimony of my commitment to the simple mission of wanting the web to be awesome. Fulfilling this mission is the reward.

How do you think W3C should build consensus in large groups, and can you speak to your ability & experience building consensus (at W3C or elsewhere)?

Consensus is the result of a negotiation that maximizes common interests. Before building consensus, you have to understand people’s interests, positions, needs, wants, and desires, and then start looking for a common approach. Consensus is not about forcing your opinion on others; it’s not a victory for those who argue the longest and tire out their opponents. We need to listen to real interests and identify common grounds, not superficial arguments. It’s the fastest and most effective way to reach consensus.

But there’s a crucial element to all this — we need to bake processes into reaching consensus. The survey has shown us that decisions at W3C take far too long. As such, we should employ concrete tools and processes to make consensus work effectively: time caps, assigning owners to specific parts of groups, holding specific people accountable to end seemingly endless discussions. In some cases, we can use a survey-like system, and vote for preferences sooner rather than later to make decisions. We owe it to the web community to be quick and agile.

My experience in building consensus comes from my work in developer communities, leading partnerships, organizing hackathons, and collaborating on open source projects. In these current and past roles, understanding different viewpoints and finding common ground comes with the job description. I strongly believe in creating structured processes that facilitate quicker decision making without compromising on inclusivity.

How can W3C improve its diversity and inclusion, and what is the role of the AB in improving those?

There’s a simple answer to this question — vote for me! The fact that I am running as a candidate is a step in the right direction, along with the priorities I’ve outlined: accessibility, agility, and inclusion. Throughout my experience in community building, I’ve learned that you can’t build communities without constantly including new people and making them feel safe and willing to contribute.

The AB has been working on the Vision for W3C, as a member of the AB how would you put the Vision into practice? How might it impact our decision making or priorities?

We’ve focused on the Perfect Vision so much, scrutinizing every word and paragraph, that it’s taken an entire year (in technology years, this is equivalent to a lightyear!) to come up with a draft. The most concerning part of this is that it turned into a rather waterfall-like approach, with no opportunities to test how the Vision holds up in real life. And by testing in real life, I don’t just mean asking the ACs for feedback or approval.

What I mean is, this vision, as the Vision of the Web — affects millions, billions, of people. Yet, we’ve developed it totally in-house. What we should have done instead, is what an agile startup, that can't afford to lose customers to an over-engineered and over-assumptive product choices, does: create an MVP ("minimum viable product") of the Vision, put it out there, and observe. Inevitably, we'd then build it incrementally as we uncover new problems, and new areas for improvement.

The vision, in its current state, is a set of principles that are hard to disagree with, but we’re yet to put them to the test. And so I can’t, in good faith, say how it would impact our decision-making or priorities.

We should start with problems and choose appropriate toolkits to solve those problems. For example, the issue of scattered information isn’t directly addressed by the vision, but it is clearly a problem that members feel strongly about, based on the survey. Solving this problem will require other approaches, but it could lead to updating the Vision with new guiding principles. This is why it’s so important for the vision to be a living document that changes with the community and technology.