Leaders of Tech Q&A: Sylvia Cadena

I am working to bring additional funding to support programs focused on two main objectives:

1. Broaden representation and participation in standardisation, so that a truly world-wide perspective is reflected in the outcomes of W3C’s work
2. Further the adoption of standards for technology that is privacy-preserving and secure and that serves everyone around the world - no matter what hardware, software, language, location or ability.

Additional funding will help us expand our training and developer relations to support professional development across the industry. These programs and support mechanisms are rooted in our horizontal pillars (accessibility, internationalisation, privacy and security), and our commitment to interoperability and sustainability.

Over the last year I have been working with the team to strengthen our online donations and sponsorships packages while exploring new mechanisms such as corporate social responsibility. We have also been working to increase our capacity to apply and manage grant funding, while looking at cooperation with different stakeholders that share our values.

I am also supporting our Global Outreach function, so that we can engage more actively in internet governance providing input about the importance and relevance of open standards, strengthening our collaboration with the open source community and promoting our work. Global standards work benefits from bringing to the table diverse skills to address technical challenges, different requirements and use-cases that are representative of different industries, cultures and geographies.

A well-known definition of the internet is that it is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardised Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). The web (or World Wide Web) is a service that runs on the internet as an information space, with items of interest, referred to as resources, which are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The first three specifications for web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML. These precisions in the technical definitions have helped the technical community and the standards development organisations to focus their efforts. W3C actively collaborates with organisations that focus on internet protocols and standards, and establishes liaisons to facilitate information sharing, for example with the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

W3C has structured its horizontal review process around these four pillars (accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security) for many years. Through these processes, new group charters and new specifications are reviewed, aiming to ensure compatibility with the existing standards across these horizontals. These pillars have served as a way for the community to express their values, declare their expertise and structure their contributions. It is a natural way to articulate the intent behind the development work that we are envisioning to broaden representation and participation in standardisation, and further adoption of standards.

As technical standards are voluntary, the community has also worked on guidelines, questionnaires, tools and training resources that offer practical ways to support responsible technology design. These support policy considerations, technology roll-out plans, measurements and research among other activities, to anchor the next phase of our development work.

A couple of examples with a focus on developing capacity and adoption, include self-questionnaires such as this one for security and privacy, that offers a set of practical questions that can indeed inform the design of online services and applications. Additional funding to support capacity building will help us expand our training and developer relations to support professional development across the industry for technology that is privacy-preserving and secure and that serves everyone around the world, no matter what hardware, software, language, location, or ability.

On accessibility, our work for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is now approved as an ISO standard, which will facilitate the adoption process for governments around the world. We are working on a government engagement strategy to follow-up.

Although sustainability is not considered one of these W3C horizontal pillars as of yet, we are making steady progress on a set of web sustainability guidelines to best practices based on the latest evidence and research. These apply to applications, websites, and other internet-related products and services, and can help with decision-making and implementation.

Incorporating an ethical framework to the development of technical standards allows the community to incorporate a shared reflection mechanism needed when making decisions that can affect billions of people.

Such an ethical thinking approach is intended to help consider the benefits and trade-offs of new standards, balanced with the excitement that comes with working on new and innovative technologies, the pressure to meet business targets, and the need to operate within policy frameworks, without losing sight of the aspiration. What results is a web that works for everyone with clear strategies to reduce potential harms.

We are also exploring ways to increase participation from stakeholders from other geographies and cultures, with different user experiences and abilities. Last year we worked to raise funding to support expert participation, specifically with individuals involved in editing of specifications, chairing groups, or part of our elected bodies, building on W3C’s previous efforts to support diversity and inclusion.

W3C is committed to ensure the long-term growth of the web. This is best achieved where the potential harms of new technologies are considered and mitigated through a comprehensive ethical approach to the design and implementation of specifications.

The web is becoming both a platform for AI and a space for AI interaction. Early last year, W3C published the report AI & the Web: Understanding and managing the impact of Machine Learning models on the Web. It reviews these intersections through their ethical, societal and technical impact and highlights a number of areas where standardisation, guidelines and interoperability could improve outcomes.

W3C’s Web Machine Learning Working Group and our Technical Architecture Group worked on a review of existing efforts around AI ethical principles. We also provided guidance for developers in the Ethical Web Principles for Web Machine Learning, which selected the UNESCO principles and provided additional guidance for developers and implementers.

The document highlights the explosion in recent years of exercises related to defining AI ethical principles and provides a comparison of some selected frameworks and a reference to more than a hundred processes globally.

At W3C, the considerations around AI and its impact are being discussed across different Working Groups, Interest Groups and Community Groups that focus on different web technologies. There are many spaces, diving deeper into specific technical areas associated with AI, including:

• Data and semantics in AI
• Web and AI agents
• AI and agent trust and identity
• AI and accessibility
• AI threat modelling, including the development of two threat models, one for AI in the browser, and one for the Agentic AI web browsers.

I really encourage people outside of W3C to get involved and find their specific area of interest, where their expertise and the support from their organisations could make a difference. For more information you can visit https://www.w3.org/get-involved/.

In addition to these efforts, linked to specific technologies, the W3C Exploration Interest Group was chartered to approach new requirements like AI on the web. A new group, the Web & AI Interest Group, is currently being formed. The group will provide a forum to explore and discuss how emerging AI-related technologies impact and intersect with the web and consider how the community could collaborate to shape these evolutions for the benefit of web users.

More broadly, I want to extend an invitation to those interested to explore and make use of the principles, ethical frameworks, guidelines, tools and resources that W3C has available. I encourage you to enhance your understanding of technical issues that affect billions of people worldwide, and to find a way to support those in your community that are interested or are already participating in the development of open standards.

To find out more about W3C’s work and to get involved, go to www.w3.org.

The views expressed are the interviewee’s own.