Learning the World

The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has a new International Liaison Group (ILG) of which I’m a member now. I’m excited to network with competent people around the globe and can’t wait to change the world. For example, there are contacts with the W3C I18N group, there are members who work for the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, or national accessibility organizations.

Objectives of the WaSP ILG include

• information and discussion about web standards and accessibility, particularly with regard to localization,
• outreach through blogs, books, articles, presentations, code, design, vision and leadership,
• translation and internationalization of documents and resources,
• keeping an eye on web trends.

There are and will be local geek meetings called “WaSP Cafés,” perhaps on a smaller scale than barcamps or other unconferences, but with the same attitude to share, discuss, learn, and get feedback.

I must admit the WaSP ILG website is a little jammed with multilingual texts where language negotiated content would be more appropriate, also the ILG is not yet featured on the front page, and there are a few minor accessibility flaws like pages linking to themselves or the logo being a background image. But I’m convinced these issues will be addressed soon. After all, the group is only six weeks old, and currently a lot of people are actively participating at SXSW.