Hi @hsano1234 ! I think the W3C does need a mission statement that is clear and succinct and one sentence, but we also need to outline in more detail our vision for this organization: its values, intentions, and operational principles. I think the Intention section captures the rationale for this pretty well. From a historical perspective also, the W3C has been guided by Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for the Web and for W3C. We didn't have to write them down, because we could always ask him for direction. But now that we are no longer led by our Founding Director, we need to be more explicit about these things so that we can collectively make decisions that are in line with our shared values and principles, which we have inherited from Tim.

Hi Elika-san,
Thank you for your response!

I intend to understand vision and mission is necessary for organization, and intention of the vision TF. But it does not mean always necessary to change mission by changing director-led to member-led entity. I think the words "Leading the web to its full potential" is already independent from Tim-san's original intention under the long history. Actually I heard and considered about the words a lot nevertheless I had very few opportunity to know about Tim-san in my short (2 years) W3C experience.

Mission and vision is a tool to encourage participants. But it implies a risk. When someone feel the mission/vision deviates whose faith, the one may discourage or leave from the organization.
Sony re-defined its "purpose" that is like mission/vision several years ago[1]. Although it is my own understanding, ex-CEO Yoshida-san was struggled very much to make the "purpose" to be inclusive all of Sony employees[2]. Yoshida-san intend to change Sony oriented toward from device manufacturer to service provider, but Sony still has very large number of electronics engineers. The "purpose" have to be forward looking, but must not discourage workers for traditional business.

Now W3C, Inc become also big organization and has very wide application area (not only communication, multimedia but also publication, payment and so on) of course as you know. If you change the mission/vision, the TF is needed determination to understand intentions of overall participants.
As far as I know, Yoshida-san have never talked about "what is creativity" nor "what is technology", if he exhibited examples. He relies on each employee to interpret the words. He probably know the risk of explanation.

Please be careful to describe detail explanation.

[1] https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/purpose_and_values/
[2] https://consult.nikkeibp.co.jp/ccl/atcl/20210818_1/
([2] is an article in Japanese. Google translate may help you.)

But it does not mean always necessary to change mission by changing director-led to member-led entity.

No, indeed. And I think the intention of this exercise is not to change the mission, but to articulate it more clearly and explicitly. We can also consider if there should be some slight adjustments now that we are considering it... But I think the primary goal of this exercise is to make explicit the existing mission and principles and values of W3C, that until now were only implicit.

So personally, I think our goal here is to do something similar for W3C as Mozilla did in 2007. Mozilla went through an exercise to draft the Mozilla Manifesto, see their original blog post. Mitchell led the effort and the drafting, but she asked the community for input. For many of us contributors, the resulting document was not a new mission, but an expression of the mission we already believed in and were working towards. It helped to articulate to the rest of the world (and to ourselves) what we valued and what we were doing about it.

I think this is not too different from what you linked about Sony. :) But because Sony is so broad, and W3C is so specific, our final result will take a different form than Sony. We need to connect more specifically to what we do at W3C, since unlike Sony, we don't do almost everything. ;)

([2] is an article in Japanese. Google translate may help you.)

Thanks. I used https://www.deepl.com/translator and I think it worked OK. :)

Thank you Elika-san,
and thank you Chris-san for picking up in an AB led meeting and explaining intention of the TF/AB.

I do not intend to disturb AB or TF to work for the Vision document.
I wanted only to say, "Mission" "Vision" is not a rule, but is like underlying faith in the stakeholder's mind. I suppose it is also a considerable way to leave a room to rely on stakeholders interpretation. It makes W3C to be more inclusive and extend to unseen area for the future.

I respect your big efforts and hope it will be good light toward bright future.

Sano-san,
I want to say I completely agree with you when you say "vision and mission is like a symbol or slogan. The shorter, the stronger." I would like to make the Vision much more concise. I do think it is necessary to light the way to a more principled path for the W3C, and explain more than just "leading the Web to its full potential"; that statement is not wrong, but I'm concerned it does not give enough direction.

Does this resolve your concern, or is there more we should do on this topic?

Hi Chris-san,
Thank you so much. We can close this topic.