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    dc:description="From time to time I hear people refer to Tim Berners-Lee as a &quot;benevolent dictator.&quot; In most cases they utter the phrase through a smile, but I find the phrase distasteful. It is also inaccurate. The W3C process has evolved..."
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                        <h2 class="entry-header">What Benevolent Dictator?</h2>
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p>From time to time <a href="/People/Jacobs/">I</a> hear people
refer to Tim Berners-Lee as a "benevolent dictator." In most
cases they utter the phrase through a smile, but I find the
phrase distasteful. It is also inaccurate.</p>

<p>The <a href="/Consortium/Process/">W3C process</a> has evolved
to reduce the central role of the Director. Without this
evolution, W3C would not have been able to reach its current work
capacity.  Steve Bratt (the CEO) has taken on much of the
management of the process. For Web architecture issues, the <a
href="/2001/tag/">Technical Architecture Group (TAG)</a> was
chartered in 2001 to document principles of Web architecture and
help resolve issues about Web architecture inside and outside
W3C. A full-time <a href="/People/">staff</a> of around 70
people help support the Director and CEO. The reality is that W3C
has intentionally distributed decision-making responsibility to a number of
parties in order to grow.</p>

<p>Most importantly, most technical decision-making happens in the
groups themselves. W3C operates as a decentralized community of
collaborating groups. They function independently, but not in a
vacuum. In a <a href="/2008/Talks/0421-ac-tbl/#(26)" title="Member-only slides">presentation</a> to the W3C Advisory Committee in April
of this year, Tim wrote: "Each group, whether or not in W3C, has
a duty to act as a responsible peer to other groups, recognize it
is part of a larger community, and to spawn independent
subgroups to do cleanly defined parts of the work when the task
is big." By coordinating, groups benefit through reviews of
specifications, shared understanding with other communities, and
useful architectural consistency.</p>

<p>What role does the Director have regarding group decisions?
According to the <a
href="/2005/10/Process-20051014/organization#Team">process
document</a>, "[t]he Director is the lead technical architect at
W3C and as such, is responsible for assessing consensus within
W3C for architectural choices, publication of <a
href="/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr#Reports">technical
reports</a>, and new Activities." When there is disagreement over
a group decision, the Director and CEO assess whether the group
has duly considered the minority views and whether the technical
reasoning behind the decision is sound. In short: has the group
done its job? When presented with a <a
href="/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies#FormalObjection">Formal
Objection</a>, the Director makes an informed decision, siding at
times with the majority, and at other times with the dissenter.

<p>Members not satisfied with a Director decision can <a
href="/2005/10/Process-20051014/acreview#ACAppeal">appeal</a>
it. It only takes 5% of the Membership to overrule Tim, hardly a
dictatorship.</p>

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                       <p class="postinfo">Filed by <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/">Ian Jacobs</a> on June 27, 2008  8:08 PM in <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/archive/web_spotting/opinions_editorial/">Opinions &amp;amp; Editorial</a>, <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/archive/w3cqa_news/w3c_life/">W3C Life</a><br />
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                                 | <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/06/what_benevolent_dictator.html#comments">Comments (3)</a>
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<h3 class="comments-header" id="comments">Comments</h3>
<div class="comment" id="comment-152199">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c152199">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Ian Hickson </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c152199">#</a> 2008-07-01</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>Ah, so <em>that's</em> why the quality of specs has been going downhill! ;-)</p>

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<div class="comment" id="comment-152727">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c152727">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Bijan Parsia </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c152727">#</a> 2008-07-04</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>There's formal power, de facto power, and exercised power.</p>

<p>It's pretty clear that Tim has a great deal of the first two. The director has enormous formal power in virtue of the given role. De facto, Tim has a great deal of informal power due to the very high respect people (rightly or wrongly, doesn't matter) have for him. He's popular, well known, and his technical ability is rated quite high. There's also a good deal of FUD related to his position, which also gives him a lot of power (e.g., in the OWL WG, people are quite quite scared of having formal objections). (Note, you <em>assert</em> that the Director makes an informed decision, but this cannot be true by definition. We'd have to <em>assess</em> whether the decisions are informed, fair, correct, etc.)</p>

<p>On the other hand, there's a lot of pushback on Tim's (or the TAG's) de facto power. Obviously, organizations can leave the W3C. People can leave WGs or take specs elsewhere, etc. Implementations can not happen or happen in odds to the specs, etc. Of course, Tim isn't presented as benevolent dictator <em>of the world</em>. After all, people can leave the python community, fork python, etc. etc. and we still call Guido a benevolent dictator.</p>

<p>Finally, I think there isn't a clear account of the exercised power. It's hard to tell without a systematic review of decisions. It's easy if one is on the wrong side of a decision to feel that the decision was arbitrary. If there's not an opportunity to actually vote, then that arbitrary decision feels dictatorial. If the formal mechanisms for overriding the decision are generally infeasible (de facto), then that it's not formally a dictatorship doesn't matter.</p>

<p>So, I don't think you've successfully rebutted this claim. It's unclear that you need to. BDs are sometimes (perhaps often) considered a benefit (due to unity of direction, efficiency, etc.).</p>

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<div class="comment" id="comment-153299">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c153299">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Mark Nottingham </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c153299">#</a> 2008-07-07</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>It's nice to see one benevolent dictator give props to another.</p>

<p><a href="http://realtech.burningbird.net/semweb/accessibility-and-microformats/#comment-471" rel="nofollow">http://realtech.burningbird.net/semweb/accessibility-and-microformats/#comment-471</a></p>

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