Category: Work

Architecting

I realized this week that I seem to have a lot more interest in architecting than in execution.

I also remembered that we become different persons based on what happens to us or the choices we have, even based on how good or bad we feel. Change may occur gradually after a long time or repeatedly on a much smaller scale. I just know it happens, to all of us, and that it is more or less perceptible (to us, to others). We are not exactly who and how we were at some point, and it makes it challenging to plan or to predict reactions (ours, other’s), but after all, isn’t it a more interesting this way?

Although I feel exactly the same, I am no longer the same person I was the last time I asked myself what I liked doing. So when I didn’t understand why I wasn’t approaching anymore things the way I used to, why some things had become unattractive to me, I got more and more worried and blamed it on not having enough time, not prioritizing the right way, or being unqualified.

Then a few things happened.

First, I had a great time when I focused on building a list and qualifying why its elements mattered individually and made sense as a whole, but it was not that pleasant a few days after to sit (thankfully for a short time) with a group that was fleshing out and categorizing the list. Worse, the only part I enjoyed was observing the deftness of the meeting convener at turning input that was sometimes diverging into something concrete. I wondered what was wrong with me to even feel the way I did (frustrated at times of some people’s carelessness, bored at other times by the pointlessness of some of the input, awed by the patience of the Chair, and puzzled that others seemed to be having such a great time.)

Second, I set aside some time to make a dent in a part of my TODO that I have kept bumping down for over a month, only to witness myself not being able to make anything of everything about it that was in my brain. If only there was a button I could press to process everything. I was unable to make myself go through the exercise and it was a source of much disappointment and of course worry. Where did my abilities go? Why the block? Welp.

Today it seems I prefer to conceive and design future implementations than to put things together and execute. From the event celebrating 30th anniversary of W3C last year to the various projects and conversations I am involved in this year, it’s clear that I choose to set the tone and direction, impress key principles, assign certain people, make specific connections, monitor promising angles, and track that the course is as plotted.

I have a keen notion of where I want to lead my small team and how to best use our collective skills and inclinations. Therefore I became more assertive over the years, the more it looked like we were doing OK, then doing alright. There is positive reinforcement in approaching things cautiously and in a way to be able to adapt nimbly. Tomorrow is exactly the 10th anniversary of my appointment as head of the W3C marketing and communications team. What changed though is that in some cases I discover I have a really hard time executing, to the extent that I am unable to remember how to.

Highlights: “We need to rewild the Internet”

Today I read We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon (April 16, 2024), and below are my personal annotated highlights from it.

Subtitle of the article, to set the tone:

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Concept of ‘shifting baselines’ which is useful in many other contexts when considering ‘change’:

As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Rewilding vs. timid incremental fixes that afford no true progress:

But rewilding a built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.

Deep defects run deep:

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath. 

Public utilities need to be recognized as such, and funded as such (including the non-profit organization I work for, W3C, which develops standards for one application of the Internet: the Web):

[Instead, w]We need more publicly funded tech research with publicly released findings. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility that we must regain control of.

Better ways of doing it (also, read as a pair with the concluding paragraph of the article which I labeled ‘manifesto’):

The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

Principled robust infrastructure:

We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance.

Manifesto (which I read several times and understood more of each time):

Ecologists have reoriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

I am looking forward to a piece (or a collection of pieces) that will talk to the people in a manner that they hear this [understand it] and that moves them to make different choices.

Pretty much as I am doggedly and single-mindedly making different and sensible ecological choices for the planet, while I look forward to people being moved at last to durably do the same.

My thanks to Robin (who I know and work with) and to Maria (who I’d like to know now)!

25th work anniversary

25 January 1999 was my first day at W3C. I was 23 years old when I started. I’ve now spent more than half my life at that. I regret nothing because I find the work I do really interesting, important, meaningful; and I don’t tire of it because I feel like there’s renewal every now and then. I’ve held many positions, worn many hats, learned a lot of things and I work with incredibly smart and dedicated people. This has been and is very rewarding.

Young white woman with long brown hair sitting at an office desk with a large cathode ray tube monitor, computer, papers, and a window with blinds in the background.
Coralie at her desk. Photo of February 1999. Resolution of 640x480px, because: early digital cameras!

I selected a highlight for each year (in many cases it was hard to choose just one, so I didn’t) for a retrospective:

  • 1999: Meeting in Toronto; my first transatlantic flight
  • 2000: Organized the first W3C TPAC in Europe: TPAC 2001, Mandelieu
  • 2001: Started to code my personal website (koalie.net)
  • 2002: Training in management
  • 2003: Elected staff representative (per French Labour law)
  • 2004: Was asked to consider joining the W3C Comm Team
  • 2005: Joined the Comm Team (half-time); became staff contact of the W3C Advisory Board (a role I held for 12 years)
  • 2006: Moved to Boston to work 9 months at MIT as a “Visiting Scholar”
  • 2007: Handed off the management of the W3C Europe team’s travels, budgets and policies
  • 2008: Joined the Comm Team full-time; organized my last big meeting: TPAC 2008 + Team Day, in Mandelieu
  • 2009: Learn to edit the W3C website
  • 2010: Put W3C on social media, and Tim Berners-Lee on Twitter
  • 2011: Interviewed for a job elsewhere but failed after round 3
  • 2012: Co-wrote the first draft of the W3C code of ethics and professional conduct
  • 2013: Training in product management; First presentation in front of W3C Members (on how incubated work moves to the standardization track)
  • 2014: Spearheaded “Webizen”, a first attempt to open W3C Membership to individuals; Re-elected Staff Representative
  • 2015: Became Head of the W3C Comm Team
  • 2016: Survived year one of the Encrypted Media Extensions public relations nightmare
  • 2017: Stopped being the AB Team contact; Survived year two of EME PR nightmare
  • 2018: Management of the W3C “diversity fund” to financially help people who are from under-represented communities attend TPAC; Re-elected Staff Representative
  • 2019: Go-to-Market strategy for W3C’s legal entity; Narrative strategy for fundraising in the future
  • 2020: W3C Website redesign project (RFP, selection, contributions, leading)
  • 2021: The “Ralph’s office zoom background” prank; W3C Website redesign (continued)
  • 2022: Re-elected Staff Representative; Website public content re-write; second attempt to open W3C Membership to individuals; proposed W3C internal re-organization; burn-out
  • 2023: W3C Website launch; got COVID for the first time; Humane Technology Design certification; e(X)filtration of the W3C Twitter account and moved it full-time to Mastodon (an instance we operate ourselves)

It is as likely as anything else that I will finish my career at the Web Consortium. I wouldn’t mind!

I stepped down from the round table

The fictional round table from the Arthurian legend of the Middle Ages is the locus where King Arthur gathered the Fellowship that ensured the peace of his Kingdom. The table was round as a symbol of the equality of its members who included royalty as well as nobles of less importance.

The World Wide Web Consortium is hardly a Kingdom but I can’t help to draw a parallel between the W3C management group and the Round Table!

Historical background

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, founded W3C to coordinate Web standards development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, and as soon as possible (which was 6 months after) added Inria (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) as the first European W3C host in 1995 (replaced in 2003 by ERCIM), followed by Keio University of Japan in 1996, and finally Beihang University in China in 2013.

For the first 28 years of the Consortium, these four Hosts partnered administratively to manage W3C Members (invoicing and collection) and to provide employment of the global W3C staff working under the direction of W3C’s management (W3M). W3M’s composition, which is rather stable, is thus based on the people in position of leadership at the Hosts. At times where a particular geography was insufficiently represented, we’ve increased representation for that geography.

2023: a new order

Fast forward to January 2023 when W3C became its own legal entity by moving to a public-interest non-profit organization and continues the same standard development process as one single corporation, and three of the Hosts became Partners. The authority, legal obligations and fiduciary responsibility are with the corporation.

A few months before the transition, the CEO we had had for twelve years retired, having successfully set enough things in motion for the Consortium to become incorporated. At this point, our COO became the interim CEO and finalized everything, put out the fires, set up the things that were required for the new corporation, and relied heavily on the rest of the W3C Team for maintaining our activities.

The W3M round table

I draw a parallel with King Arthur’s round table because his gesture was a federating one, and his goal was to rule the kingdom with all of its stake-holders. The W3C Management team (W3M) today continues with the same assortment of people from our global distributed team, some of whom are no longer managers, and some of whom are not involved anymore in any W3C Team work.

Redesigning it

One of the side projects I undertook last year was to propose a new internal organization, that I called “the Houses model”. It aimed to (1) merge the related functions to achieve a coherent, manageable and meaningful operating model, (2) remove “split” staff where possible, in order to gain in efficiency and coordination, and (3) attempt to fix the known negative optic that 25% of the W3C team (yes! incredible!) were on W3M, by streamlining it.

It took me a month to design it, socialize it with key people, make further adjustments, and put it to W3M’s vote. The resolution passed (yeah!) but it was the (then) CEO’s opinion that the consortium could not withstand an internal reorganization before the transition (meh!).

Objecting and finally leaving the round table

Starting before the W3C Inc. transition, W3M activities, which were to continue unchanged, slowed down rather abruptly and gradually came to a halt. W3Mers held their honorary positions while fewer matters were discussed and the group met less and less frequently, ultimately to deal asynchronously with scraps only.

I understand the inherent inertia of big groups. I recognize the allure of expediting decision-making where there is too many pressing matters and not enough time. But I thought that a temporary structure to allow leadership with transparency could have been set up, and some of the frustration could have been prevented. Not by scrambling to implement the Houses model we had decided to adopt. But with due diligence and open dialogue so that everyone understood the need for extraordinary measures.

For about a year, the status quo did not sit well with me (and I let the group know, early and often) because the opacity was not fair to the [rest of the] group itself, but also to the W3C Team and W3C Members whose expectations remained that decisions were the consensus of W3M, when it was no longer the case. I had concerns about the risk of taking insufficiently informed decisions or uninformed decisions. I had a strong discomfort with being personally associated with any decision that I actually hardly contributed to, if at all. So I asked to step down from the management group a few weeks ago and today I did.

I continue as Head of the W3C Communications team and have enough on my plate to keep me busy. I would be happy to consider rejoining the W3C Management team in the future, but as I do not care about a honorary position, it would have to be for meaningful contributions again.

December update: In the meantime, W3C hired a new CEO, who after a few weeks was ready to reconvene the management team. I was invited rather organically.