Statements about TAG Nominees for 2017 Election
Form for
AC to vote | TAG home
This is the list of nominees for the 2017 election to the W3C
Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Each person has been nominated
by at least one W3C
Member according to the TAG
election process.
- The W3C Membership elects the TAG. For this election W3C will fill two
seats. W3C will announce the results the second week of January 2018.
Note: The deadline for votes is 23:59 ET, 5 January
2018.
The following statements were sent about the nominees (in alphabetical
order by nominee family name):
- David Baron (Mozilla Foundation)*
- Andrew Betts (Fastly)*
- Reto Gmür (FactsMission)
- Lukasz Olejnik (W3C Invited Expert)
An asterisk (*) indicates that the nominee is a current participant. All
individuals were nominated by the AC Representatives of their
organizations unless otherwise indicated below.
David Baron (Mozilla Foundation)*
I am a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla, where I have worked since it
became an independent company in 2003. I have been involved in the CSS
community and the development of the Gecko layout engine (used in Firefox)
since 1998. I have been Mozilla's representative to the W3C Advisory
Committee and to the W3C's CSS Working Group since 2004, and a member of
the TAG since a special election in May of 2015.
In my role at Mozilla, I implemented major CSS features such as media
queries, CSS transitions and animations, and the CSS calc() function,
designed and implemented the reftest regression test format for layout
tests, and have been involved in the development of many aspects of Gecko
from design and implementation of architectural changes to security bug
fixing.
As a participant at the W3C, I edited the CSS Color Module, CSS
Conditional Rules, CSS Transitions, CSS Animations, and the CSS Overflow
Module, and I have been deeply involved in much other work in the CSS
working group, and involved in the work of other groups as well.
I hope to see the TAG move the Web in a direction that makes it better for
both its end users and for developers. A big part of this is the path in
the Extensible Web Manifesto, which promotes exposing lower-level APIs
that allow building higher-level APIs without first freezing them into
browsers. This lets developers build new technology more quickly, and at
the same time gives us a better way to manage the increasing complexity of
Web technology. As we do this, we should keep the Web's technology
deserving of the trust of users, so that users can stay secure and in
control even when using Web sites that they don't fully trust. In some
cases, this may mean balancing the power of new APIs with the ability of
the browser and the user to intervene and meaningfully modify the behavior
for a better experience. I'd like to continue to be part of a TAG that
encourages the Web to move in this direction.
I'd also like the TAG to continue to help advise and mentor contributors
to standards, and help to grow the set of people who can effectively
contribute to standards. This involves both being receptive to questions
brought to the TAG, and helping to generalize and document the advice that
we give so that it is accessible to and useful to others. In this role,
the TAG should balance keeping the Web platform consistent with itself
with allowing innovation from a broad group of contributors.
Andrew Betts (Fastly)*
Microsoft is pleased to re-nominate Andrew Betts for this TAG election. In
the TAG's role guiding the development of web standards, Andrew brings the
important perspective of the web development community, as a practical web
developer with a career spanning almost 20 years, leader of several major
open source projects, and organiser of web development community events
ranging from meetups to major conferences. It's essential for the TAG to
balance the expertise of implementers with the problems and demands of
developers, and Andrew is qualified to represent the developer
constituency.
Andrew is principal developer advocate for Fastly (a content delivery
network focused on fast, secure and scalable content delivery for
customers such as the New York Times and GitHub), and formerly head of
front end standards at the Financial Times in London, where he spent a
year on secondment to Nikkei in Tokyo. He is founder of two startups, and
a leading organiser in the developer community.
FT has been well regarded for making practical and innovative use of web
technology in products such as the FT progressive web app (
www.ft.com),
and for making significant contributions to open source via projects such
as Fastclick (
https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick).
While at the FT Andrew started polyfill.io, which now serves around 5
billion polyfills per month to upgrade the web for millions of users.
In terms of events, Andrew has participated in the program committee for
O'Reilly's Velocity conference (
http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity),
has organised many developer events through the London Web Performance and
Edge conf (
https://edgeconf.com)
brands, and is also a prolific conference speaker on web technologies.
In his first term on the TAG, Andrew authored the TAG findings "Polyfills
and the evolution of the web" (
https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/polyfills/)
and "Distributed and syndicated content" (
https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/distributed-content/)
and was a contributor on "The evergreen web" (
https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/evergreen-web/).
He has an interest in improving communication and documentation practices,
and organising events that engage the broader developer community in which
he works every day. He has specific technology interests in installable
and discoverable web apps, paid and premium content, performance
monitoring, web payments, caching and networking.
Reto Gmür (FactsMission)
I never wanted to be an astronaut, but since I know about the TAG I've
been dreaming of becoming one of its member, one day...
I believe that a simple, elegant and well integrated set of web standards
can change society for the better. In 2002 I first presented the concept
of a trust based social network for the decentralised exchange of RDF
content. Even if since then I've been focusing on standard Linked Data
technologies, the idea of integrating trust and social aspects might be
more topical now than ever before. I've been working for Adobe and HP labs
as well as several startup companies and in European research projects on
topics such as semantic content management and graph versioning. Besides
everything related to Linked Data I've a strong interest in accessibility
and internationalization.
While I'm new to the structures of the W3C I believe to be able to bring
fresh perspectives and motivation to keep the web simple yet capable of
facing the pressing societal needs. In my experience I'm good at
separating hype from solid future proof innovation. I believe that a
worthy contribution to the TAG is more about setting priorities and
demanding simplicity rather than the ability to scrutinize specs all night
long, because of this I don't regard my neurological condition as an
impediment even if it makes me less productive than I used to be.
My company FactsMission AG is a startup company based in the bilingual
town of Biel/Bienne (Switzerland). The goal of FactsMission is to use
Linked Data technologies to help distinguishing facts from noise. We help
public and private organizations to publish data following Data on the Web
Best Practices so that it can be used in a credible fact checking
infrastructure. We are active in several open source projects: Twee-Fi for
example, a project based on LDP and schema.org, allows to review claims
made in tweets. It has been clear since our founding that contributing to
the W3C is important to us, we would be happy to intensify our commitment
by participating in the TAG.
Lukasz Olejnik (W3C Invited Expert)
Lukasz was nominated by Center for Democracy and Technology.
I have been actively involved in security and privacy of the web for 8
years now. My experience includes work as an independent consultant,
academic, researcher, as well as work with industry firms and policy
bodies. I completed a PhD in computer science (Privacy) from INRIA
(Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique). As a
privacy engineer, and researcher, I most recently worked on the European
ePrivacy Regulation, which is very related to the web and web browsers.
Accordingly, I have extensive and broad experience from industry,
academia, and technology policy. My research includes areas such as
techniques and consequences of data leakage (e.g. browsing history); web
tracking, profiling and fingerprinting; privacy engineering and privacy by
design. Currently, I work as an independent security and privacy
consultant and a researcher.
I have worked on the impact of security and privacy of web APIs, an area
that is important to web browsers and the W3C. A few notable examples
include my involvement in work on the Battery Status API, Ambient Light
Sensors API, and Payment Request API. I contributed to their analysis,
privacy risk assessment, and then demonstrating how they could be misused
as well as helping to improve these standards to avoid such misuse. As
part of my research, I identified actionable recommendations on
privacy-aware design of APIs. This is all to say I have some understanding
of W3C APIs, its designs, and the unintended aspects that may have
unexpected consequences.
I believe that focusing part of TAGs work on architecture and strategy,
timely responding to current developments and helping and providing
guidance would be beneficial. As such, my focus in TAG would be mainly on
security, privacy from a number of angles. My key aim would be helping to
study and hopefully improve the W3C Process in relation to security,
privacy and digital ethics, as I believe the TAG’s role is instrumental in
these respects. Notably, since European technology regulatory landscape is
taking a dramatic overhaul in 2018, the TAG’s role will need to identify
and respond to any challenges. I would bring experience from multiple
domains to TAG, including technology regulations such as GDPR and the EU
ePrivacy regulations.
I have been a W3C Invited Expert in the Device and Sensors WG since 2015
as well as a member of the Privacy Interest Working Group. In 2017, I also
joined the Web Payments Working Group. I am happy with my work having had
impact on W3C, browsers and web standardization. I had the pleasure of
studying a number of interesting cases. Notably the Battery Status API
[1], where we identified a number of unintended consequences that could
lead to information leaks or even user tracking. Soon afterwards, this
mechanism has indeed been found used by malicious scripts [2]. Ultimately
these findings may have influenced decisions by browser vendors such as
Firefox and WebKit to remove the functionality [3], and convinced some
vendors to introduce user interface changes. Furthermore, this example
provided a useful use case study hopefully improving privacy engineering
of web standards and browsers [4]; notably making stringent defaults and
operational assumptions for web sensors. During my work at DAS WG and
based on my research and experience I developed a unique approach to
analysing web standardization. One of its application has been the
analysis of Ambient Light Sensors [5]. I’m also sometimes picky when it
comes to clarity of specifications that may lead to consequences for
implementations, as in the case of Web Request API [6]. In summary, I
picked three examples of standards where I assessed privacy that resulted
in amended specifications and implementations.
For more about my work you can visit this site
https://lukaszolejnik.com
or blog
https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com
[1] L. Olejnik, G. Acar, C. Castelluccia, C. Diaz, “The leaking battery: A
privacy analysis of the HTML5 Battery Status API”, Data Privacy
Management, 2015;
https://lukaszolejnik.com/battery.pdf
[2] S. Englehardt, A. Narayanan, “Online Tracking: A 1-million-site
Measurement and Analysis”, The ACM Conference on Computer and
Communications Security (CCS) 2016;
http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf
[3] Bug 1313580 - Remove web content access to Battery API;
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313580
[4] L. Olejnik, S. Englehardt, A. Narayanan, “Battery Status
Not Included: Assessing Privacy in Web Standards”, International Workshop
on Privacy Engineering 2017;
http://lukaszolejnik.com/AssessingPrivacyWebStandardsIWPE17.pdf
[5] “Stealing sensitive browser data with the W3C Ambient Light Sensor
API”, 2017;
https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/stealing-sensitive-browser-data-with-the-w3c-ambient-light-sensor-api/
[6] Privacy of Web Reqwuest API, 2017;
https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/privacy-of-web-request-api/
Coralie Mercier
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