Get involved in W3C Internationalization

Related

List of groups

Benefits of participation

Participation can benefit the participant and his or her organization in the following ways.

• Significantly develop your understanding of how W3C technologies are used in a global Web and bring that knowledge back to your organization.
• Review the state of the art in a range of Web technologies and develop understanding of key internationalization issues by reviewing specifications.
• Raise your profile and that of your organization by developing best practices, and education and outreach materials.
• Contribute your and your organization's ideas and needs for the development of new specifications.
• Discuss and explore ideas alongside other leaders in the field.
• Gain exposure to internationalization issues in a wide range of technologies.
• Lay claim to contributing directly to making the World Wide Web more worldwide.

The groups need people with a wide range of skills, from technical authoring to specialised knowledge of particular technologies.

Join the Internationalization Working Group (i18n WG)

The Internationalization Working Group provides a wide range of advice and support for groups developing or using international aspects of the Web. It reviews specifications produced by other W3C Working Groups, looking for issues that would cause barriers to deployment and use of Web technologies due to language, script, region or culture, and discusses issues with those groups. It also produces its own documents and content. This includes requirements, guidelines and proposals for specification writers, as well as educational resources, checkers and outreach to help developers and content authors better understand and more widely implement the internationalization aspects of W3C technology. The group also develops tests for internationalization features on the Web, and produces summaries of their results.

See the home page for more information, including how to sign up.

Join the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG)

By subscribing to the [email protected] mailing list you can join the Internationalization Interest Group. This will enable you to track discussions and work of the i18n WG, since the list recieves daily digests of all Github traffic and can also be used for adhoc discussions, where appropriate. There are no teleconferences. To join, send a mail to [email protected] with subscribe as the subject.

See the home page for more information.

Join a Language Enablement group

Under the umbrella of the i18n IG, and supported by the i18n WG, there are a number of initiatives in place to identify international typography problems experienced by Web users and content authors. The task forces identify and analyse the gaps that exist, document the related requirements, and help spec developers and browser implementers to introduce support for needed local features.

See the Get involved with Language Enablement for a list of groups, and information about how to contribute.

Join the ITS IG

The ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) Interest Group aims to foster a community of users of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) by promoting its adoption and gathering information for its further development. ITS provides a set of concepts that can be mapped to markup and that make it easier to internationalize and localize documents. The group works through a public list and wiki, and monthy teleconference calls.

See the home page for more information.

Internationalization Sponsorship Program

The W3C is looking to increase participation and funding so that we can expand our activity beyond the core work. We invite organisations, governments, and all interested stakeholders to support the sponsorship program. For more information, see the Sponsorship overview 

Join a Community Group (CG)

There are also some related Community Groups. New CGs can be started at any time, so you may need to check for new groups from time to time. Note that these are not run by the Internationalization WG. Anyone can join a CG. See the full list of CGs.

Other ways to contribute

• Join the Github discussions Active discussions appear in digests posted to the www-international mailing list.
• Review articles prior to publication and send comments.
• Review W3C specifications for internationalization issues, and send comments to the Working Group. See the next subsection for more information about how to go about this.
• Provide information about language or script usage in response to our requests for information.
• Track or comment on gaps for use of the Web in your region.
• Translate some of the Internationalization Activity's articles.