Given how much tech and privacy policy have been appearing in the headlines recently, I was curious to know more about the groups that actually guide these technologies that impact millions of peoples’ lives. The World Wide Web Consortium — W3C for short — is one of these groups, responsible for codifying a set of standards for the web. Along with ECMA International, a standards body to created to oversee the development of JavaScript (ECMAScript is the ES in ES6), the W3C creates proposals that are standardized and adopted by browsers.
The W3C is split up into working groups, which consist of invited experts and representatives from member organizations. I collected data on 309 organizations across 41 working groups. Most of the organizations are private companies, but there are some universities and non-profits as well.
Not surprisingly, the most well-represented organizations are browser manufacturers like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, Baidu, and Alibaba. Other tech giants like Adobe, IBM, and Intel are represented too. To help better understand what these companies are most interested in, I built a small interactive tool to browse organizations and see what groups their representatives are working with.
Click on the name of an organization to see associated working groups, and use the control panel to refine your search and see more or fewer organizations. Scroll down for methodology.
Showing companies holding more than 50.00 seats.
Search
Normalize by group size?
I’m not affiliated with the W3C in any way, this post was simply made using publicly accessible data on their website. This data was obtained from the W3C website in April 2018. Some organizations were listed as being members of a group but having no current representatives, in this case they were given a value of 0.5 representatives. The group size totals reflect the total number of organizational members, not including invited experts, whose participation is not affiliated with a specific organization.
The member groups are sized according to the selected organization’s level of participation in each group. The layout is calculated by react-masonry-component, which although
imperfect, provides a good at-a-glance overview of each organization’s major interests. If you’d like to visualize this data in a different way, feel free to take it from the github repo linked below, in the data folder.