On organisational involvement and collaboration in W3C standards through editorship

Abstract

Over time, a number of open standards have been developed and implemented in software for addressing a number of challenges, such as lock-in, interoperability and longevity of software systems and associated digital artefacts. An understanding of organisational involvement and collaboration in standardisation is important for informing any future policy and organisational decisions concerning involvement in standardisation. The overarching goal of the study is to establish how organisations contribute to open standards development through editorship. Specifically, the focus is on open standards development in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Through an analysis of editorship for all W3C recommendations we contribute novel findings concerning organisational involvement and collaboration, and highlight contributions from different types of organisations and countries. We make five principal contributions. First, we establish an overall characterisation of organisational involvement in W3C standardisation. Second, we report on organisational involvement in W3C standardisation over time. Third, we establish how different organisations, organisation types, and countries are involved in W3C technologies. Fourth, we report on organisational involvement in relation to standard development time. Fifth, we establish how organisations collaborate in W3C standardisation through social network analysis.

On Engagement With ICT Standards and Their Implementations in Open Source Software Projects

“…This may indicate that the observed lack of interest amongst SMEs is in-line with previous research which shows that there are considerable barriers for entry for smaller organisations wishing to contribute to development of standards in the context of traditional standardisation organisations (Krechmer, 2006). Further, the identified domination of LEs based in the US and Asia that contribute to the editorship of H.264 is similar to the overall domination of US-based LEs and organisations observed in editorship in W3C standardisation (Gamalielsson and Lundell, 2017b).…”

“…A similar set of categories was used in Gamalielsson and Lundell (2017b in over 100 papers in a variety of international journals and conferences. Professor Lundell has been active in a number of international and national research projects which have lead to significant scientific and societal impact, and has been an expert advisor and contributed to guidelines and policies in the field.…”

Open Source Software reference implementations for standards issued by different standards setting organisations: availability, perceptions and practices

“…Blind and Boehm, 2019;Boehm and Eisape, 2021). Related to this relationship there are, for example, studies which investigate organisational influences in and between the W3C RDFa standard and its implementation in the Drupal OSS project (Gamalielsson et al, 2015), issues and experiences concerning implementation of the PDF format in OSS (Gamalielsson and Lundell, 2013), organisational involvement and collaboration in W3C standards through editorship (Gamalielsson and Lundell, 2017a), technical and licensing challenges for organisations planning software development covering IT standards (Lundell et al, 2019), issues concerning the relationship between OSS and IPR aspects including Standard Essential Patents (e.g. Blind et al, 2011;Bekkers and Updegrove, 2013;Contreras et al, 2023;Husovec, 2019;Maracke, 2019), and implementation of ISO standards in OSS (Lundell et al, 2015).…”

Invisible Pixels Are Dead, Long Live Invisible Pixels!

“…The examples include so-called browser fingerprinting, multi-device identification, tracking through local storage and caching, canvas-based tracking, and Flash cookies [11,21]. Given the traditionally extensive lobbying at the World Wide Web Consortium [14,24], also many standardization initiatives have been proposed as alternatives to image-based web beacons. For instance, a ping attribute has been introduced for <a> tags in order to make tracking easier; when a user clicks a hyperlink, a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) POST request is sent to the destination specified in the attribute.…”