Don’t call me DOM

Every year since 2000, W3C gathers a good chunk of its 69 groups (which, by the way, represent a community of 1500 persons) for a week of face-to-face meetings, offering the opportunity to have joint meetings between these groups, as well as plenty of informal interactions between the participants.

But one of the big highlight of the week remains for me the Technical Plenary day: during a full day, all the participants week are put together in a big room to discuss some of the hot topics in the W3C community, based on a set of presentations and panels. As always, all the proceedings of the event are released publicly, making for a great source of knowledge available to all – you can see for yourself from the list of previous technical plenaries.

This year again, the agenda for the plenary day (on Wednesday November 7) looks like it will trigger some interesting discussions: if you can imagine a bunch of talented Web geeks – each with his or her own speciality, be it XML, HTML, Web Services, SVG, CSS, mobile, accessibility, internationalization – having a discussion on HTML5 compared to XHTML 2, or how to make W3C a more open organization, or discovering the true face of W3C (at least as perceived by outsiders), spiced up by the always-popular lightning talks, you’ll get the feeling of what an exciting day it should be.

While it isn’t as good as having the meeting opened to all – I’d love it if we could find the proper logistical arrangement to make this happen -, this year will offer a few improvements to make it even more visible to the community at large:

• in addition to the detailed minutes of the day, the audio recording of the presentations and subsequent discussions will be made available
• the press and some bloggers have been invited to report on the meeting

So, be ready to hear more from this meeting!