W3C Fall 2016 meeting and W3C Highlights

We held this year's all work-group annual meeting a few weeks ago in Lisbon, Portugal. TPAC 2016 was a very productive and smooth meeting, where more than 550 experts from the Web community met. It was the highest attendance ever for a TPAC held in Europe, and close to the highest ever anywhere. Notably, it was the first time in TPAC history that there were temperatures above 20°C (68°F) every day.

Almost 40 Working and Interest Groups met and as many breakout sessions took place during the Technical Plenary unconference, to discuss emerging technologies that may benefit from standardization work at W3C. Read more on the advancements to the Open Web Platform and specific industry requirements for the next generation Web in the press release we issued as the meeting week concluded.

A few topics stood out, reflecting the innovative nature of the meeting: The Blockchain session was crammed with people. Web VR is another big and promising topic that we are looking at (the W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality takes place next week in the Silicon Valley).

The week was punctuated with a number of features:

• Tim shared his vision on redecentralizing the Web during the Plenary session;
• The Publishing Community met. This is part of the effort to bring the Publishing community closer to the Web community (read our May announcement);
• We opened the meeting to W3C Community Groups, 20 of which took us up on the offer and met throughout the week;
• The Web of Things PlugFest, where all envisioned building blocks came to life during demos, was a highlight. We held a series of PlugFests timed with the Web of Things Interest Group face-to-face meetings this year and were able to show the interoperability work to the bigger audience of TPAC. The W3C Advisory Committee has been reviewing a proposed Web of Things Working Group charter.
• W3C Members had an opportunity to discuss the recent W3C staff reorganization which changes focus from domains to strategy, project, industry, architecture & technology management.
• A small and peaceful demonstration against W3C's work in EME took place and gave way to conversations between protesters and members of the W3C Team and W3C community.
• We entertained our audience with a private screening of the documentary film ForEveryone.net about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the history of the Web and a call to protect its future. Tim, during his interview with Coralie Mercier after the showing, emotionally touched on his experience in watching his own movie in the company of the Web Developer community who has worked with him for decades in enhancing the Web.

Lastly, as part of preparation for TPAC, we published for the Membership "W3C Highlights – September 2016," now public, which I invite you to read.