The World Wide Web Consortium has formed a new advisory board to help its various working groups get in sync and work more closely with emerging industry.
The board will advise consortium teams, whose numbers continue to grow, on how to manage the development of Web technology standards, both internally and externally.
"This will improve the technical consistency of the Web architecture as a whole and ... provide better representation for members and their interests," said Josef Dietl, head of communications for the W3C.
The consortium launched the new group to ensure that Web specifications, such as HTML and the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), will continue to work together.
The group will also reach out to companies in industries that are only beginning to embrace the Web, such as television set-top-box makers and firms developing mobile-phone technology that allows handheld devices to display Web-based information.
"It is difficult to predict the communities that will be affected by the Web in the future," Dietl said.
The advisory board will work with other standards-setting bodies such as the International Standards Organization and the Internet Engineering Task Force to ensure that the technologies and specifications they're developing are not redundant and do not clash with existing standards.
Mostly, though, the consortium will rely on the group to keep its own house in order.
"The World Wide Web Consortium started with 30 member organizations -- now we are 300," Dietl said. "This growth by a factor of 10 needs some new method to gather input from W3C membership. The advisory board [will] advise the W3C on high-level strategic issues, broad management questions, and ... provide feedback on the activities of the W3C."
One observer thinks the panel can only help the W3C with its increasingly monumental task.
"The W3C is working on a large and heterogeneous set of projects," said Tim Bray, co-editor of the W3C's eXtensible markup language specification. "Anything that helps ensure consistency and sanity has to be a good thing."
Members of the new board include Carl Cargill of Sun Microsystems, Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly & Associates, Paul Grosso of ArborText, Ora Lassila of Nokia, Larry Masinter of Xerox, Bede McCall of MITRE, Thomas Reardon of Microsoft, David Singer of IBM, and Jeffrey Ullman of Stanford University.
"The most important benefit for us is that we can have a closer contact with the membership," Dietl said. "The way we work will be more open and better for all the members of the W3C."
