21 ms·

W3C’s transfer from MIT to non-profit going poorly

159 points by andruby 4y ago

sinistersnare 4y ago
Easier Thread to read than Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603834995830816769.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603834995830816769.html
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  Mastodon version without ads, tracking, or GA or Twitter analytics (and with discussion/feedback): https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913 https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913 (I'm not sure we should even be linking to the Twitter copy, given that the author's name there is giving attribution to him as "@robin@mastodon.social", so surely that should be considered the authoritative version, and it doesn't require delegating to any third-party aggregator hack.)
  - trynewideas 4y ago
    The Mastodon version also has this testy exchange with Google's Chris Wilson, a standards manager who's also on W3C: https://mastodon.social/@cdub/109525438620997614 https://mastodon.social/@cdub/109525438620997614
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
Man MIT seems to really be losing its clout (PR capital) especially in the last decade or so. (And I am not usually one to participate in the “dumping on prestigious institutions” meme that’s grown in popularity as well.) This is obviously one sided, but assuming most of this is factual… not good.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  MIT has a beautiful campus and many great papers and organizations have come from its past, but it has this reputation as the ultimate CS research hub which houses all of the smartest people and creates all the discoveries and inventions of the future. My understanding is that besides its reputation and the fact everyone knows about it, MIT is fundamentally not really different than any other great tech university. And many big universities are starting to turn more into businesses. The "admins have seized the Ivory Tower" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.c...) applies to MIT as well.
  - mlinksva 4y ago
    It apparently started out fundamentally different though https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-history-of-early https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-history...
  - KMag 4y ago
    Having graduated from MIT, I would say that the Great Dome and other buildings surrounding Killian Court are beautiful. I don't particularly care for the modern architecture that makes up the rest of the campus, but I'm also not a connoisseur of architecture. At least 20 years ago, MIT's greatest strength was its student body and its culture. You got the sense everyone was striving to learn as much as they could, and most students reveled a bit in their nerdiness. In high school, I took classes at a well-regarded state school, and didn't get the same sense of intellectual hunger. IHTFP (simultaneously I Have Truly Found Paradise and I Hate This F'ing place) summed up culture pretty well. You got the sense that you and everyone else had lined up to drink from the fire hose, and were going to struggle through it together, and come out the other side better for it. I have several friends who got grey patches in their hair during undergrad from stress, that went away shortly after graduation and didn't show up again for another 15 or 20 years. I hope that pressure cooker feeling isn't actually necessary for rigor. I hope MIT has found some way to keep the rigor while being a bit more easy on the mental health of the students. MIT ensured every month had at least one holiday by inserting one fake Monday holiday in each month without a holiday, as a mental health break. I heard the mental health breaks were a result of the high suicide rate in the 1980s. Thankfully, none of my friends committed suicide, but a few friends of friends committed suicide in my time.
    - dinvlad 4y ago
      There’s also this interesting mix of humbleness and ambitiousness, with the real feeling of “everyone can change the world” by actually doing fantastic things, instead of boasting about their skills. It sorta feels like a place where the engineers are superheroes. It’s a bit tragic that a lot of times this comes at the cost of mental health, though MIT has gone a long way to improve that.
    - 4y ago
- adambyrtek 4y ago
  Their handling of the Aaron Swartz case (rightfully) caused a massive hit to their reputation.
- ilamont 4y ago
  That's right. The "Skoltech" program was one such initiative, basically taking hundreds of millions from the Skolkovo Foundation (run by Oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a member of Putin’s inner circle) in 2010 in return for setting up the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology near Moscow. Despite getting a lot of heat for this, MIT kept it going: The university in 2019 signed a five-year extension of its lucrative partnership with the Russian technology research institute, which has long raised espionage fears among foreign policy experts and the FBI. The extension came just three months after the federal government announced it was investigating MIT’s compliance with reporting requirements for the Russian money it had received in connection with the project. The article notes MIT only ended the cooperation after the invasion of Ukraine. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons-russian-high-tech-campus-partnership-in-light-of-ukraine-invasion https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons...
aliljet 4y ago
These kinds of threads are always so hard to decipher. Without disclosing the terms and details MIT is allegedly providing, you just have to assume the one side complaining is telling the truth when there's almost certainly two sides to this problem. That said, don't get me wrong, I'm always down for a quick pitch fork roast on the internet.
- bsder 4y ago
  Normally when things have reached the "Air it in public" level of greivance, what is being put out in public is at least factual--just probably not all of the facts. However, I can quite easily see this happening on the MIT side. Some mid-level bureaucrat who doesn't even know what W3C is will be losing budget, so they're playing hardball assuming the usual level of scrutiny. They're going to get a surprise when they get dumped on by their managers because this suddenly hit a lot of eyeballs and is garnering negative PR for the entire university.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  That’s partly because twitter is just about the worst possible place to have a detailed conversation on an issue, really just about any issue. I have no idea why anyone of any level of technical sophistication or containing halfway decent communication skills makes the attempt. Choose a free blog, write something more substantive, and write a succinct Twitter post to get people aware of it. Or at least do that at the same time you post a balkanized “thread” like the author here and link to the more substantive post in the process.
  - mattl 4y ago
    People aren’t reading random blogs as much as they’re reading social media
    - theshrike79 4y ago
      Thus: link to random blog from social media.
that_guy_iain 4y ago
This is interesting. MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets. W3C is playing hardball MIT's reputation. I think the fact it's reached the point they're publically talking about this means they're is very little chance MIT is going to be backing down. The real question for me is would US officals allow W3C to move aboard. Could they prevent it? I have a feeling MIT's lawyers have thought alot of this out already.
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  The W3C always had "branches" in US, EU and Asia. What could be at stake here is to not have an entity in the US anymore.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    And I'm wondering if the US goverment which is a bit of a control freak, would allow there not to be any W3C under their control? Especially, if the major players in the tech world are US entities. I could see this just breaking up and ending the W3C more than the W3C having leverage.
    - google234123 4y ago
      Why would the US gov care about something that doesn't matter?
      - that_guy_iain 4y ago
        W3C does matter to an extent. Which is why so many mega corps pay people to work on their stuff.
- justin66 4y ago
  > W3C is playing hardball {with} MIT's reputation. It's more like softball, if we're being honest. 99.9% of the public doesn't care, and of the small portion of the public who is familiar with both MIT and W3C... I'll just predict that nobody is going to show up and protest, or bring torches and pitchforks, or anything because of twitter threads. Nobody is going to cut MIT's funding because of this, and they'd have to really cut in order to make MIT reconsider dumping what must be a money-loser for them already. Really playing hardball with MIT's reputation would involve getting Tim Berners-Lee in front of the mainstream press to talk about this. > MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets. That is hardball.
largepeepee 4y ago
My understanding is that ivy league schools have impossibly huge coffers, and this seems to boil down to money. Or perhaps MIT is offering a bad deal on purpose to sink negotiations?
- astura 4y ago
  MIT isn't in the Ivy League. The Ivy League, which is an athletic conference, consists of Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
  - socrates1024 4y ago
    How big are its coffers though? - Mit: $26.4B - Yale: $42.3B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007 https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Endowments are independently run and the last thing the money men would do is give the admins or academics a say, or they’d fritter it all in short order, like how Larry Summers lost Harvard a cool billion dollars through ill-judged investment strategies for its operating funds.
- ajkjk 4y ago
  I don't think they do? They have large endowments, but they have to preserve those mostly, and the number of things they have to pay for is huge. They're still run like an organization that has to be accountable to its budget. Also, MIT isn't Ivy League, technically.
  - Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
    It's worse than that, most endowment funds are earmarked for specific purposes.
graycat 4y ago
Looks like the long time CEO of the W3C resigned in November, 2022. Hmm ....
uwuemu 4y ago
pmontra 4y ago
W3C members list at https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List and team https://www.w3.org/People https://www.w3.org/People What would be the impact of the USA part of the team shutting down? The big USA companies will still be there and will keep advancing their agendas. What the rest of the world can do?
bawolff 4y ago
What does the w3c do that actually requires money? Are standard editors actually paid? I always assumed that they were volunteering their time on behalf of whatever company they worked for. For that matter, what liabilities are we talking about here? Hosting a website? Maybe i am just naive, but what else is there?
- simonw 4y ago
  https://www.w3.org/People https://www.w3.org/People has a list of 57 people and what their role is - it's not clear to me if they are all full time paid staff but I think most of them are.
  - allannienhuis 4y ago
    Two people listed as CFO? <shrug>
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Wow who knew they had so many full time employees? To be honest I assumed it was entirely volunteers & people employed at other companies, like the C++ standards committee.
thesausageking 4y ago
Note that OP (Robin Berjon) works for Filecoin, a crypto project that raised a huge ICO and has never really delivered on all of the promised hype. His full-time role is to get Filecoin's projects more embedded into standards like those the w3c oversees. And they obviously have specific opinions about how they'd like to see the w3c run. I would take a skeptical view of his take on what's happening. The w3c is a very dysfunctional organization and there has been a lot of turmoil internally. Jeff Jaffe who had been CEO for more than a decade quit in November. There are power plays behind the scenes to fill this vacuum.
- naet 4y ago
  W3C pushing crypto nonsense is in my opinion killing aby remaining respect for the organization. Stuff like the DID standards earlier this year are nonsense and were heavily objected by maintainers of Firefox and Chrome, but got pushed through anyways. Will they simply ignore W3C recommendations going forward? Seems likely to me. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_objections/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_obj...
  - riedel 4y ago
    I am seeing currently w3c people pushing blockchain stuff in European cloud standardization activities. This really worrying me. This explains to me now why W3C seems so broken.
    - mardifoufs 4y ago
      I never quite understood why blockchain vaporware is so prevalent in europe. It is also popular in the US, sure, but it seems more embedded and at higher levels than in the EU. Is there a reason why? (I'm not necessarily talking about crypto coins specifically, more about blockchain as a technology in general)
    - ciupicri 4y ago
      What are you talking about?
metacritic12 4y ago
Interesting that inside the thread above are threats against MIT, drama claims of MIT costing jobs during holiday season, and even threats to transfer contracts / IP to China. Seems like not a neutral thread, but posturing and propaganda in its own right from the W3C.

159 points by andruby 4y ago

Easier Thread to read than Twitter: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603834995830816769.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603834995830816769.html

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
Mastodon version without ads, tracking, or GA or Twitter analytics (and with discussion/feedback): https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913 https://mastodon.social/@robin/109524929231432913 (I'm not sure we should even be linking to the Twitter copy, given that the author's name there is giving attribution to him as "@robin@mastodon.social", so surely that should be considered the authoritative version, and it doesn't require delegating to any third-party aggregator hack.)
- trynewideas 4y ago
  The Mastodon version also has this testy exchange with Google's Chris Wilson, a standards manager who's also on W3C: https://mastodon.social/@cdub/109525438620997614 https://mastodon.social/@cdub/109525438620997614

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

Man MIT seems to really be losing its clout (PR capital) especially in the last decade or so. (And I am not usually one to participate in the “dumping on prestigious institutions” meme that’s grown in popularity as well.) This is obviously one sided, but assuming most of this is factual… not good.

armchairhacker 4y ago
MIT has a beautiful campus and many great papers and organizations have come from its past, but it has this reputation as the ultimate CS research hub which houses all of the smartest people and creates all the discoveries and inventions of the future. My understanding is that besides its reputation and the fact everyone knows about it, MIT is fundamentally not really different than any other great tech university. And many big universities are starting to turn more into businesses. The "admins have seized the Ivory Tower" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.c...) applies to MIT as well.
- mlinksva 4y ago
  It apparently started out fundamentally different though https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-history-of-early https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-history...
- KMag 4y ago
  Having graduated from MIT, I would say that the Great Dome and other buildings surrounding Killian Court are beautiful. I don't particularly care for the modern architecture that makes up the rest of the campus, but I'm also not a connoisseur of architecture. At least 20 years ago, MIT's greatest strength was its student body and its culture. You got the sense everyone was striving to learn as much as they could, and most students reveled a bit in their nerdiness. In high school, I took classes at a well-regarded state school, and didn't get the same sense of intellectual hunger. IHTFP (simultaneously I Have Truly Found Paradise and I Hate This F'ing place) summed up culture pretty well. You got the sense that you and everyone else had lined up to drink from the fire hose, and were going to struggle through it together, and come out the other side better for it. I have several friends who got grey patches in their hair during undergrad from stress, that went away shortly after graduation and didn't show up again for another 15 or 20 years. I hope that pressure cooker feeling isn't actually necessary for rigor. I hope MIT has found some way to keep the rigor while being a bit more easy on the mental health of the students. MIT ensured every month had at least one holiday by inserting one fake Monday holiday in each month without a holiday, as a mental health break. I heard the mental health breaks were a result of the high suicide rate in the 1980s. Thankfully, none of my friends committed suicide, but a few friends of friends committed suicide in my time.
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    There’s also this interesting mix of humbleness and ambitiousness, with the real feeling of “everyone can change the world” by actually doing fantastic things, instead of boasting about their skills. It sorta feels like a place where the engineers are superheroes. It’s a bit tragic that a lot of times this comes at the cost of mental health, though MIT has gone a long way to improve that.
  - 4y ago
adambyrtek 4y ago
Their handling of the Aaron Swartz case (rightfully) caused a massive hit to their reputation.
ilamont 4y ago
That's right. The "Skoltech" program was one such initiative, basically taking hundreds of millions from the Skolkovo Foundation (run by Oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a member of Putin’s inner circle) in 2010 in return for setting up the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology near Moscow. Despite getting a lot of heat for this, MIT kept it going: The university in 2019 signed a five-year extension of its lucrative partnership with the Russian technology research institute, which has long raised espionage fears among foreign policy experts and the FBI. The extension came just three months after the federal government announced it was investigating MIT’s compliance with reporting requirements for the Russian money it had received in connection with the project. The article notes MIT only ended the cooperation after the invasion of Ukraine. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons-russian-high-tech-campus-partnership-in-light-of-ukraine-invasion https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons...

aliljet 4y ago

These kinds of threads are always so hard to decipher. Without disclosing the terms and details MIT is allegedly providing, you just have to assume the one side complaining is telling the truth when there's almost certainly two sides to this problem. That said, don't get me wrong, I'm always down for a quick pitch fork roast on the internet.

bsder 4y ago
Normally when things have reached the "Air it in public" level of greivance, what is being put out in public is at least factual--just probably not all of the facts. However, I can quite easily see this happening on the MIT side. Some mid-level bureaucrat who doesn't even know what W3C is will be losing budget, so they're playing hardball assuming the usual level of scrutiny. They're going to get a surprise when they get dumped on by their managers because this suddenly hit a lot of eyeballs and is garnering negative PR for the entire university.
ineedasername 4y ago
That’s partly because twitter is just about the worst possible place to have a detailed conversation on an issue, really just about any issue. I have no idea why anyone of any level of technical sophistication or containing halfway decent communication skills makes the attempt. Choose a free blog, write something more substantive, and write a succinct Twitter post to get people aware of it. Or at least do that at the same time you post a balkanized “thread” like the author here and link to the more substantive post in the process.
- mattl 4y ago
  People aren’t reading random blogs as much as they’re reading social media
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    Thus: link to random blog from social media.

that_guy_iain 4y ago

This is interesting. MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets. W3C is playing hardball MIT's reputation. I think the fact it's reached the point they're publically talking about this means they're is very little chance MIT is going to be backing down. The real question for me is would US officals allow W3C to move aboard. Could they prevent it? I have a feeling MIT's lawyers have thought alot of this out already.

fabrice_d 4y ago
The W3C always had "branches" in US, EU and Asia. What could be at stake here is to not have an entity in the US anymore.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  And I'm wondering if the US goverment which is a bit of a control freak, would allow there not to be any W3C under their control? Especially, if the major players in the tech world are US entities. I could see this just breaking up and ending the W3C more than the W3C having leverage.
  - google234123 4y ago
    Why would the US gov care about something that doesn't matter?
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      W3C does matter to an extent. Which is why so many mega corps pay people to work on their stuff.
justin66 4y ago
> W3C is playing hardball {with} MIT's reputation. It's more like softball, if we're being honest. 99.9% of the public doesn't care, and of the small portion of the public who is familiar with both MIT and W3C... I'll just predict that nobody is going to show up and protest, or bring torches and pitchforks, or anything because of twitter threads. Nobody is going to cut MIT's funding because of this, and they'd have to really cut in order to make MIT reconsider dumping what must be a money-loser for them already. Really playing hardball with MIT's reputation would involve getting Tim Berners-Lee in front of the mainstream press to talk about this. > MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets. That is hardball.

largepeepee 4y ago

My understanding is that ivy league schools have impossibly huge coffers, and this seems to boil down to money. Or perhaps MIT is offering a bad deal on purpose to sink negotiations?

astura 4y ago
MIT isn't in the Ivy League. The Ivy League, which is an athletic conference, consists of Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.
- socrates1024 4y ago
  How big are its coffers though? - Mit: $26.4B - Yale: $42.3B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007 https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Endowments are independently run and the last thing the money men would do is give the admins or academics a say, or they’d fritter it all in short order, like how Larry Summers lost Harvard a cool billion dollars through ill-judged investment strategies for its operating funds.
ajkjk 4y ago
I don't think they do? They have large endowments, but they have to preserve those mostly, and the number of things they have to pay for is huge. They're still run like an organization that has to be accountable to its budget. Also, MIT isn't Ivy League, technically.
- Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
  It's worse than that, most endowment funds are earmarked for specific purposes.

graycat 4y ago

Looks like the long time CEO of the W3C resigned in November, 2022. Hmm ....

uwuemu 4y ago

pmontra 4y ago

W3C members list at https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List and team https://www.w3.org/People https://www.w3.org/People What would be the impact of the USA part of the team shutting down? The big USA companies will still be there and will keep advancing their agendas. What the rest of the world can do?

bawolff 4y ago

What does the w3c do that actually requires money? Are standard editors actually paid? I always assumed that they were volunteering their time on behalf of whatever company they worked for. For that matter, what liabilities are we talking about here? Hosting a website? Maybe i am just naive, but what else is there?

simonw 4y ago
https://www.w3.org/People https://www.w3.org/People has a list of 57 people and what their role is - it's not clear to me if they are all full time paid staff but I think most of them are.
- allannienhuis 4y ago
  Two people listed as CFO? <shrug>
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Wow who knew they had so many full time employees? To be honest I assumed it was entirely volunteers & people employed at other companies, like the C++ standards committee.

thesausageking 4y ago

Note that OP (Robin Berjon) works for Filecoin, a crypto project that raised a huge ICO and has never really delivered on all of the promised hype. His full-time role is to get Filecoin's projects more embedded into standards like those the w3c oversees. And they obviously have specific opinions about how they'd like to see the w3c run. I would take a skeptical view of his take on what's happening. The w3c is a very dysfunctional organization and there has been a lot of turmoil internally. Jeff Jaffe who had been CEO for more than a decade quit in November. There are power plays behind the scenes to fill this vacuum.

naet 4y ago
W3C pushing crypto nonsense is in my opinion killing aby remaining respect for the organization. Stuff like the DID standards earlier this year are nonsense and were heavily objected by maintainers of Firefox and Chrome, but got pushed through anyways. Will they simply ignore W3C recommendations going forward? Seems likely to me. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other organization working on a widely accepted list of web standards. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_objections/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/07/01/w3c_overrules_obj...
- riedel 4y ago
  I am seeing currently w3c people pushing blockchain stuff in European cloud standardization activities. This really worrying me. This explains to me now why W3C seems so broken.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    I never quite understood why blockchain vaporware is so prevalent in europe. It is also popular in the US, sure, but it seems more embedded and at higher levels than in the EU. Is there a reason why? (I'm not necessarily talking about crypto coins specifically, more about blockchain as a technology in general)
  - ciupicri 4y ago
    What are you talking about?

metacritic12 4y ago

Interesting that inside the thread above are threats against MIT, drama claims of MIT costing jobs during holiday season, and even threats to transfer contracts / IP to China. Seems like not a neutral thread, but posturing and propaganda in its own right from the W3C.