Who Shapes the Open Web? An interactive tool to explore membership in W3C working groups.

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 — W 3 C 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.