Systems
The W3C Systems Team provides and maintains the tools and infrastructure to make the W3C experience easy and the most effective. Its responsibilities include:
- Maintenance of the W3C Website, Blogs and wikis (co-owned with W3C Marketing & Communications);
- Data security, servers setup and maintenance, backups;
- Group services and database, accounts management;
- Mail and mailing lists services;
- Maintenance and migration of in-house tools.
Denis Ah-Kang
Denis joined W3C in August 2011, as part of the Systems Team, to become the W3C Webmaster at the MIT host site in Cambridge, MA, USA.
Between 2013 and 2014, he joined the Interaction Domain to work on the HTML5 test suite. He is now working on maintaining the W3C infrastructure and is involved in the development of the publications tools.
Prior to joining W3C, Denis worked for various consulting companies as a software developer.
Denis is currently based in Reunion Island.
Denis's Github account
Laurent Carcone
Role: Systems Team
Laurent joined the W3C team in September 2000 to participate in the development of Amaya.
He is now part of the Sytems Team.
Before joining the W3C, he worked as an engineer at INRIA Grenoble.
Laurent hold an engineering degree in computer science from the CNAM Grenoble (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) in 1997.
José Kahan
José joined W3C's technical staff, at INRIA Rhône-Alpes, in January 1996. He participates in the development of Amaya, and in various other projects, including W3C's hypertext mailing list archives. José holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université de Rennes I (1997) and a specialization degree in computer networks from the École Supérieure d'Électricité (SUPELEC), Rennes.His research interests include distributed systems and W3 security.
Vivien Lacourba
Role: Head of Systems Team
Vivien joined W3C in May 2003 as the W3C Webmaster at the MIT/CSAIL host site in Cambridge, MA, USA.
Since September 2004 Vivien is working as a Systems & Network Engineer for W3C Europe at the ERCIM host site in Sophia-Antipolis, France.
Vivien graduated in September 2003 from the Polytech Nice Sophia engineering school (formerly known as ESSI) in Sophia-Antipolis, France.
He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science, specializing in Networks. In June 2000, he received a two year degree in Computer Programming at the University of Lyon, France.
Yves Lafon
Yves Lafon studied Mathematics and computer science at ENSEEIHT in Toulouse, France, and at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Montreal, Canada. His field of study was signal recognition and processing. He discovered Internet Relay Chat and the Web in Montreal in 1993 and has been making robots and games for both. He joined the W3C in October 1995 to work on W3C's experimental browser, Arena. Then he worked on Jigsaw, W3C's Java-based server, on HTTP/1.1 and started the work on SOAP 1.2.
Yves is now the TAG Team Contact and Web Transport Team Contact.
Gerald Oskoboiny
Gerald joined W3C in September 1997 as a member of the Systems Team. He helps maintain W3C's system infrastructure including the web and mail servers, mailing lists and publishing tools. He created W3C's HTML Validation Service based on an earlier validation service he began as a student.
Prior to joining W3C, Gerald worked at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and as a technical writer for IBM Canada in Toronto.
In his free time Gerald enjoys travel, photography, and writing software.
Gerald has a Bachelor of Science with specialization in Computing Science from the University of Alberta.
Jean-Guilhem Rouel
Role: Systems Team
Jean-Guilhem joined the W3C Systems Team in August 2006 as the W3C Webmaster at the MIT/CSAIL host site in Cambridge, MA USA.
He graduated in October 2006 from Polytech'Nice-Sophia Computer Science Department (formerly known as ESSI: Ecole Supérieure en Sciences Informatiques) specialized in Networks.
In September 2003 he received a two year degree in Mathematics and Computer Science (DEUG MIAS) at the University Jean-François Champollion in Albi, France.
Ralph Swick
Role: Chief Operating Officer
Ralph joined W3C in January 1997, to focus on the Privacy and Demographics project. As that project (now called P3P) was starting, Ralph also started the Metadata project. The Resource Description Framework became a full-time responsibility when the Metadata Activity turned into the Semantic Web Activity. In 2007 Ralph became the leader of the Technology and Society Domain and in 2009 was appointed Acting Chief Operating Officer. As of 2010 the 'acting' qualifier was removed. Then in 2022 Ralph was appointed as Interim Chief Executive Officer of the new W3C, Inc. In November 2023 when W3C's permanent CEO joined, Ralph resumed his role as Chief Operating Officer.
Ralph came to W3C from the X Consortium, where he was Technical Director for the X Window System. Ralph brings to W3C both a systems background and an application background. Long involved with the X Window System, Ralph was one of the architects of the Xt Intrinsics (user interface) toolkit.
Prior to joining the X Consortium, Ralph was a software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Office Systems Advanced Development Group. There he worked on information filtering tools (software agents) and computer-supported cooperative work tools. Before that, Ralph was in Digital's Corporate Research Group working at MIT Project Athena. Ralph holds a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University.
Ralph's interests are in applications of Web technologies to support human-human interaction, especially over time and distance.
