Igalia's Brian Kardell chats with the Head of W3C Marketing & Communications, Coralie Mercier about the her history and relationship with the Web and the W3C.
Brian Kardell: Okay, hi. I am Brian Kardell. I'm a Developer Advocate at Igalia, and we do these series of web history to try to catch a oral history of the web and the people who helped build it along the way so that none of this is lost in history. We think it's really potentially interesting. So today I'm joined by my good friend, do you want to introduce yourself?
Coralie Mercier: Hi, Brian. Thank you. My name is Coralie Mercier, and we've known each other for about 10 years I think.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. We met, you work at the W3C.
Coralie Mercier: W3C, yeah. I've been at W3C for 25 years.
Brian Kardell: 25 years, wow.
Coralie Mercier: You can see now that I come with it. I started doing administration and now I'm doing communication.
Brian Kardell: I heard you tell a story one time about how you got introduced to the web, which is a thing that I like to ask in all these web history conversations because it's not a thing anymore, right? It's just, being introduced to the web today is being introduced to electricity. It's just part of the ebb and flow of normal life. I think in these history things, it's fun to capture how you went from the time before the web to learning about the web, and you had a really fun story about how you learned about the web. Can you share it?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I'm happy to. I learned from the web before I actually knew what it was. I learned from the web by looking at the cover of a CD, which I dug for you.
Brian Kardell: All right.
Coralie Mercier: That's the one.
Brian Kardell: Celine Dion.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. So it was on the back of the CD plastic thing, and I no longer have it of course, but you can still see it here at the bottom. I remember seeing, 'For more information connect with Sony online at http://www.sony.com.' And I thought, I'd like to connect with Celine, I'm a fan of hers. I was, don't know, 19 or 20 anyway. I thought it doesn't look like an address or a phone number. I just puzzled over it for a while and then forgot entirely about it because I didn't actually go to the web until maybe two, maybe three years later?
Brian Kardell: I had to look this up, because preparing for this, we shared some notes and things. I had to look it up because that was, I think you said 19.
Coralie Mercier: '96 or '95.
Brian Kardell: 1996?
Coralie Mercier: '96.
Brian Kardell: So the W3C started in late 1994, right?
Coralie Mercier: Yes.
Brian Kardell: And the following year, the stats that I find say that one-fifth of the United States and maybe one-tenth of the UK, those are just the only ones I could find readily had access to internet at all. But the web, even in that was fringe, because mostly what that meant was email, you had access to email
Coralie Mercier: Academics, and it was internet use.
Brian Kardell: The web was really fringe, so that's impressive to me. I wonder how that came about, that Sony already was, who at Sony thought we should put that on? It probably was Celine, she was.
Coralie Mercier: It could be, yeah. I don't know if others did it before. I don't know if Sony did it for all of the artists that they produced, and it's very true. According to the figures that we have, in 1994, it was mostly the US and Canada which had access to the internet, and it was about 1 million users.
Brian Kardell: So then a few years later, you did get introduced to the web?
Coralie Mercier: To the internet.
Brian Kardell: To the internet, yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. I got introduced to the internet before I discovered the web, and I didn't even know they were part of the same. I mean, I didn't know the web was an application of the internet, but I started to use IRC when I was in university. That was in 1996.
Brian Kardell: That's amazing to me. I didn't use IRC. Maybe I did, but I didn't think of it as our IRC until W3C.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, because we use it. It's very resilient, and it runs even in a text program, which is how I run it still today. We have built a number of tools that let us do things like bots to transform stuff that gets written in IRC, into HTML minutes even. So yeah, we rely on it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, CSS Working Group especially has a lot of bots and things that post them to GitHub issues and all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah, so how did you come to.
Coralie Mercier: To know of it?
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, that was an interesting, I mean, I feel lucky to be able to tell that story because I think I heard it from the other guests that you had on this podcast. Like them, I was the beneficiary of incredible luck. The people I used to hang out with when I was in Edinburgh at university knew people who worked at Inria, and Inria was the first host of W3C. But I did not know that then. They were looking for a secretary, and I came back from Scotland and I was looking for a job, and they said, 'Oh, you should apply there,' which I did, and I got the job. That was 1998, and it was a six-month gig. And then I was gone for another few months, and they called me again saying, 'W3C is looking to hire someone because Inria wants to reclaim the stuff that they lent them.' And I applied and I got the job and that was January 1999.
Brian Kardell: But when you were there, you were exposed to a lot more.
Coralie Mercier: Tech.
Brian Kardell: Nerdy stuff, right?
Coralie Mercier: Oh, yeah. And I came from a pretty nerdy family already. My dad got us a Commodore 64 when my twin brother and I were kids, so we used to play pinball on it and stuff, but my dad used to do serious stuff. He would use the computer, and then we had other computers, but he would use the computer and program in Visual Basic or something else, because he was a doctor and he had to fill a number of forms. He had decided that it was going to be easier to have the form in the computer so that he would just need to type something once and then recall that information. So every patient he was following had a file, and then he had made it so that all of the forms for social security could be printed on a dot matrix printer, and he created that program. So I came from a nerdy family, but the level of nerdiness that I encountered while at Inria was, I mean it was nothing like, I mean, I was not prepared for it of course. I think I told you the story of the 1998 World Cup Soccer Championship, which.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I was hoping you would tell that story.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. The workstation I was using then was a Sun SPARCstation, and it was equipped with a bunch of Unix program so I got familiar with that environment, which I knew nothing about. But my point is that a lot of things were done through the terminal, including watching the Soccer World Championship in ASCII.
Brian Kardell: That's amazing.
Coralie Mercier: I don't know how they did it, but you visited some, I think it was some, I don't know if it was FTP or something else, but it was from the terminal. What you saw, you had to go a little further back from the computer in order to be able to imagine that this was TV, but it was ASCII being morphing in front of yourself. I don't remember what we did for sound. I have the impression that we had to maybe listen to the radio. I don't think it came from the terminal. Anyway, I thought that was crazy and I told my dad when I came back, 'We did this at work today, and it was like a school recess.'
Brian Kardell: Right. Did you learn a lot working in that environment?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, because I was quite young, and everything that I had learned at school was not useful to me then so I had to learn new things and working with a scientific team involved doing a number of things, including producing reports. I learned LaTeX before I knew what HTML was. I don't think, even at the time, I recall that we used intranet more than we use extranet. There was not a lot of things I needed for my work then. It was not W3C then. There was not a lot that I needed to be on the web for, intranet was sufficient. I learned LaTeX, I learned how to work with people, working in English of course.
Brian Kardell: So then in '99, you went to W3C?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: And I also, just to keep the perspective, I looked up the same statistics that we were just talking about. It seems like at that point already, about 26% of the US had internet at home, and about 15% in Europe, 2% in China was able to find. But also, that's the year that Napster came out. Remember Napster?
Coralie Mercier: Yes, I do.
Brian Kardell: Napster, wow. It was fun. And probably all of us got way too many songs that, I had the best music library for those couple of years. Some of what we did with Napster was still stuff that were in a weird way on the web trying to catch up to, because it was peer sharing. It was.
Coralie Mercier: It was.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, and so you could create and share from your device. That was something that even Tim's original browser was part of the vision you could edit with a WYSIWYG in the browser.
Coralie Mercier: Yes.
Brian Kardell: And I think that that translated over into W3C project at first too, right? Wasn't there a?
Coralie Mercier: Amaya?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, Amaya.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, Amaya was. Maybe some people continue to use it. We've decommissioned it because we stopped maintaining it since HTML5. Amaya does not support HTML five so we made it open source. Well, we put the source available so in case people want to port it, but Amaya was the first and possibly the only WYSIWYG editor you could edit while you were browsing. Pretty much even better than a Wiki, because in the Wiki, you have to go through the edit interface so it was different. But yes, Amaya was a great browser, and I used it many, many years. I think I stopped using it and moved to Emacs just when we stopped maintaining it, I guess.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I think also, I guess sites have gotten more complicated because they involve JavaScript and CSS as well. But even in that, we have dev tools and they're still, even those are not connected in the same kind of integrated way that they were in early. I don't know if, do you remember Netscape also had.
Coralie Mercier: Oh, yeah. Composer.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. Composer, right?
Coralie Mercier: I do, yeah. I think I used that. The first, yeah, I think I recall using it. I mean, when I rented my first domain name, I think I started with that.
Brian Kardell: I think I might have too, actually. Yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. And I found it great, and I still feel the hole in me that this particular tool left, because it was not replaced as far as I can tell.
Brian Kardell: That's actually excellent way to segue, because also that year, Blogger came out. That was the year the Blogger came out.
Coralie Mercier: Blogger was nice.
Brian Kardell: Did you use Blogger?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I did. I had a couple of blogs.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I think it was a way to fill a similar hole, right? You could publish as well. It wasn't the browser doing it, but it was using the browser technology.
Coralie Mercier: Yes, totally.
Brian Kardell: And you didn't have to worry about the hosting. Somebody would host it for you.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, exactly. That was great.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. And then came, WordPress must have come much later, but I recall also moving from Blogger. Well, I didn't really move from Blogger because I kept that blog, but I tried My Opera, my.opera.com community, which was exactly the same. They offered you space, they offered you the tool, which was exactly the same, well, exactly the same, same mechanisms as Blogger used, and I really loved it and then they sunset it at some point.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So now I know you still have a blog because.
Coralie Mercier: I do, yeah.
Brian Kardell: I follow it. It's WordPress, right?
Coralie Mercier: Yes. It's a self-hosted WordPress, and I don't like it.
Brian Kardell: You don't like it?
Coralie Mercier: No, I don't.
Brian Kardell: You have a lot of posts though, right?
Coralie Mercier: Yes, because I ported to it all of the blog posts which I had created and wanted to keep. At the beginning of blogging, I don't remember. I don't know if you remember a software that was called Blogsome.
Brian Kardell: No.
Coralie Mercier: No, okay. So it was at the time when we had a Blogsome, movable type, really the early era of blogging. And what I liked about Blogsome was that it could run on my machine, and the post could be just local. I would not publish them. I used that as a diary. But some of the posts I liked and so I got those. I got My Opera posts, some of the posts which were on WordPress, and I moved everything together so that blog published in, I don't know, 2005 maybe? I have about 500 posts. I try to post maybe once a month now. I used to post a lot more.
Brian Kardell: So now we have ActivityPub and some ideas including one that was created, championed by Tim Berners-Lee, all a lot of similar ideas in W3C that hopefully we'll get some agreement on. But these are ways to own your data more. We're in ActivityPub, working in, owning your social media presence and everything as well. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens there, because I do think that some of those early ideas about you being a publisher as well as a subscriber, and then you owning that and not being just what was on your Twitter or what was on your Blogger or whatever is really valuable.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. It's as though, you remember the Web dot something trends? Web.2 or 2.2, I don't remember, because I try not to use them because they are kind of meaning, I find them meaningless because they have different meaning for different people. One of that era was putting stuff on the web, and then it became something more complex. I hope that we are at the tail end of the complexity, because you mentioned before how web editing became complex, and I remember when we used to look at the source code of a website in order to make your own website. The home page I have on the W3C website today for maybe my team page, I built exactly like that. I looked at somebody's CSS, and I try to understand how it worked and do it. And then all of a sudden, we could no longer do that, or I could no longer do that, it became too complex. I hope we are at the tail end of that era where we can go back to a more manageable mechanisms and ways. You probably followed that team's, what is it, a startup. He created a startup called Inrupt, and he wanted to work on the concept which he calls Solid. He wanted that to have some kind of standing and use the process which he developed for the consortium that he founded. So after a year or two of trying to make this fit in a way that the broadest set of stakeholders can look at it, I think we eventually got there with the creation of a working group, which not called solid for obvious reasons, but it's called Linked Web Storage Working Group, and that is just getting started now. We started it last week or something. Yeah, there is this.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, it'll be super, super interesting to see what happens there.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: So you've been at W3C now since 1999. What was the first big thing that you did at W3C? Do you remember your first TPAC?
Coralie Mercier: Yes. I remember my first TPAC. It was in 2000, and I helped arrange it. Back then, I was part of the administrative team, and organizing meetings was a strength of mine. I got to partner with colleagues in the United States. We worked using Wikis in order to do more efficient work. I remember my first TPAC, and I also remember the second, because I organized it completely solo. It was in 2001.
Brian Kardell: Wow.
Coralie Mercier: The first of a long series of TPAC meetings, technical plenary and advisory committee meetings that would be held in Mandelieu, which is in the southeast of France in a huge hotel by the beach so that was really nice. Yeah, I remember it. Yeah.
Brian Kardell: That's really nice. I've never been to one there, so looking forward to that one.
Coralie Mercier: I thought you had at least seen it. We stopped in, I think 2008.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I think my first TPAC was 20.
Coralie Mercier: 2012.
Brian Kardell: 2012, yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So you could not have seen it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So you started your website in about the same time, right?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I think so. 2002 or something. But it was not, I mean, my website is not a big deal. I just wanted it to learn. Basically, I wanted to learn, and it's more to have fun with it and be able to share links to photos with my family than anything else. So I think the first big thing I did at W3C was to put W3C on social media, really. I mean, I did a bunch of things and I kickstarted the number of things at W3C, and the number of processes and how, so it's really background work the way we do work. I did a lot of that to streamline processes or create new processes, but that's something that nobody sees. It's just background stuff. But putting W3C on social media and getting Tim Berners-Lee an account on Twitter is visible. I was the one suggesting this and doing this. I think I still have his password.
Brian Kardell: Oh, really?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. I don't think he changed it because.
Brian Kardell: Interesting.
Coralie Mercier: I tried once.
Brian Kardell: He's not on there so much anymore.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: I think W3C has left Twitter as well now, right?
Coralie Mercier: We have, yes, in December last year. We chose to be just on Mastodon, and we are hosting our own instance, and on LinkedIn because.
Brian Kardell: Sure.
Coralie Mercier: It's the place to be.
Brian Kardell: Right.
Coralie Mercier: But we started on social media in 2010, possibly even earlier, because when Identica was released, I think it was before 2010, it could have been as early as 2008 or '09 something. So we were on Identica, which is the grandparent of Mastodon.
Coralie Mercier: Was also, had a say in ActivityPub. So it's been a long love story.
Brian Kardell: That's right. Yeah. I do remember that actually. Since 1999, at least from the outside, it seems to me that a lot has changed in the world, and a lot has changed.
Coralie Mercier: Yes.
Brian Kardell: In the W3C. Can you tell me what are some, yeah, I mean, tell me some ways that you think that the W3C has evolved? What's some interesting history that you've seen in the evolution of W3C?
Coralie Mercier: I think if I had to say one thing I would say that I witnessed, we witnessed the whole tech ecosystem going from followers who were following W3C staff, which were the experts. And then there was a shift when everybody caught up, and now the experts are everywhere. The dynamic had to shift at some point. I think it was rather organic, but I remember that shift and there was a bit of unsettling. We were unsettled at some point, not realizing. I mean, all of a sudden, all of a sudden it became clear we are no longer the experts. So there was this shift, and I don't exactly remember when that was. Probably between 2005 and 2010, probably closer to 2010. So there was that. I also, if there is a second thing I could say is that we noticed massive surge of the work. At first we had, I don't know, maybe 20 working groups, and we thought that was a lot. And today we have more 50 and 10 interest groups, and we think it's a lot. Maybe there is a time in the future when our staff increases, and as well as our capacity to spawn new groups increases as well. There was this constant increase in the number of groups that we create, and we don't create groups for the sake of creating groups. We create groups because there is some matter for a specific group to look at, so they may be bundled in one specific area doing pretty much the same thing, but they are all different. And then there are other areas which have nothing to do with one another. So yeah, we noticed as well that surge, and it's because the web has become more powerful and is becoming still more powerful with the amount of things you can do with it.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. I think the creation of community groups and interest groups itself was a shift from.
Coralie Mercier: Yes.
Brian Kardell: Before that, right? Because before that, there was only working groups and tall order to start up a working group, or taller order, because you do have to have, I guess more consensus, more agreement that that's a thing that we're going to do.
Coralie Mercier: And bandwidth.
Brian Kardell: More buy-in.
Coralie Mercier: And opportunity as well, because yeah, I think that you're right, that community groups, which we launched in 2012 I think, or '11, offered people an opportunity to gather and rally around new ideas and incubation. Whereas before, there were fewer opportunities or it was like fringe innovation and niche probably as well. Community groups were a way for new ideas to be socialized and incubated in a number of working groups since then have been spun out of community groups and specs packaged by community groups for working groups so that's very interesting.
Brian Kardell: Another thing that I think probably a lot of people don't know that maybe we can talk about, it shocked me that there was no, you had to be a legal entity to join the W3C, but the W3C itself was not a legal entity. It was this loose affiliation of academia basically hosts. But now, that's another change that's happened, right? In the past couple of years, WTC has become a legal entity.
Coralie Mercier: Yes. I think you're tackling two related but different things.
Brian Kardell: Okay.
Coralie Mercier: You have to remember that the consortium was created in 1994. It was spurred by Tim Berners-Lee himself. He started to realize that there was a need to get the key players together so that the output of their work for, not the infrastructure of the web, but how the infrastructure of the web is used could be coordinated. The model that they used was based on the XConsortium. It was a member consortium, so you had to be an organization yourself. I don't know whether you're talking so much about this aspect which mandates that in order to become a member of the World Wide Web Consortium, you have to be an organization, but it's not actually true. What we are lacking is a fee for individuals. So any individual is welcome to join, and we've had one, maybe two in the past. One individual who joined as an individual, turned out they had to pay as a small company because we have not priced it because the level at which we operate is more to the level of our big organizations who create products that are used on the web than at the individual levels. But you and I both know that there is improvements which could be made and that the voice of individuals could be heard. You and I did try with a number of others to create something which had the time we called Webism, which would allow for reasonable fee individuals to actually have a voice. Because at W3C, we have been welcoming participation from everyone, and we've done the work in the open, and we have, I mean, our process mandates us to take in the input from the public, which happens at any time on the recommendation track, but at particular times, which we call review times. So we do that, but we can overrule that feedback, whereas when member weigh in, they weigh in with the power of their right, which is we call reviews also, which is confusing, but their review has some power. You said W3C changed and became its own legal entity. It's true that for 28 years, we were the partnership of four academic institutions. Started at MIT, and then Inria became the second host for Europe, and then Keio in Tokyo became the Asian host. That was in, I don't remember the dates, but maybe 1998 for Inria, or no, 1996 or something. And then a couple of years later for Japan, and then we had to wait till 2013 for China to join as a host with Beihang University. And 28 years after, boom, we created the W3C Inc. It was at the beginning of last year, and we are a 501(c)(3).
Brian Kardell: I think that's really exciting. I think that part is really exciting because it goes to this, we're still figuring out how to do all this, and I think one of the things that we realized 30 years in is that we probably could use some more ways to fund this work.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Making something after having 30 years worth of trying to fundraise and do all these different things, one of the bits of feedback that I've heard a lot, because Igalia does, we work on open source for other companies. We work on web standards on behalf of other companies, and one of the things I've heard a lot is that it would be easier for companies to do work like this if there were tax incentives to do it so that it made them the work more revenue neutral. It made it seem like less of a hit that you have to take as a business. So if there were some advantages, not advantages, incentives to this work, then it might be easier. It will be interesting to see how true that is with W3C. I hope that it is very true. There are good reasons for big organizations and small organizations to fund W3C, because you can make a charitable donation.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, incorporating in the US as a 501(c)(3) means that for US organizations, they can be tax-exempt so that's already the case, and I think that a number of US based organizations have taken advantage of it. I don't think it's true of other areas yet. But the point I also wanted to make sure to tell you is that by, so W3C is turning 30 years old in three weeks. So we are an old organization, but we sprung as this-
Brian Kardell: Hey, not old. Come on now.
Coralie Mercier: I'm going to open a parenthesis and digress just a little bit. But when I was hired in, well, I had my job interview at the end of 1998, but when I was hired, I heard something like, 'We're really keen to have you, but you have to know that a consortium has a lifespan of about 10 years.'
Brian Kardell: Wow.
Coralie Mercier: 'Enjoy it while it lasts.' So this is the perspective I'm coming from when I say that W3C is that old because the, and it may be that things have shifted, but consortia have a lifespan of 10 years. End of the digression, the opportunity of relaunching as a 501(c)(3) and a public interest nonprofit also gives us an opportunity to decide perhaps how differently we may want to do things, focus on things that previously we may not have been in a position to do, like focusing so much more on human rights or sustainability, I don't think. And we've tried some, not that, but we've tried in the past to convinced our members to follow us in a particular path and that has not worked. And maybe this time, because we are really springing, we can write our own story for the next 30 years.
Brian Kardell: I think this is actually a really interesting thing because it's again, part of the whole evolution. Start with W3C. We have HTML, CSS came pretty quickly, MathML and SVG were very early. And then we got accessibility as a focus in W3C in, when was it, '97?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, '97. Yeah.
Brian Kardell: And now we have some of the things that W3C helps organize and has experts in even.
Coralie Mercier: Internationalization, yeah.
Brian Kardell: Internationalization. Go ahead, yeah.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah. IATN, internationalization. That's been maybe from 2000, sorry, not 2000. 1998 as well. So it's one of the early, we call that horizontal work. Do we? Yeah, we call that horizontal work because it spans everything. Potentially every tech, every specification will have to dab into a number of specific areas. Accessibility, of course, internationalization, because it became clear that there was not just Latin alphabet to be used on the web. So in order to welcome the scripts, even the writing directions, be inclusive of all these cultures, it became obvious that we had to have some experts and continue to have experts. We had Richard Ishida as lead of that activity for many, many years, and he retired last year. And Fuqiao Xue picked up the slack. But we have other similar areas like privacy and security, which have been very long-going as well at W3C, and we hoping to create new ones in addition to these four. In particular, sustainability, we just hired a few people to look at privacy, security and sustainability. Privacy and security because we had a gap to fill from many years ago, and sustainability, because that's something we've wanted for a long time to dive into because we think it matters just the same way we think security, privacy, internationalization, and web accessibility matter. And also, I've personally been a very strong proponent at W3C of doing more for human rights. And I'm hoping that I can continue to convince the right people for, I don't know, maybe something next year.
Brian Kardell: I guess we should probably share because it's not a given that everybody knows how the W3C works, or since we're recording this for posterity, maybe 100 years in the future, somebody has no idea what the W3C was like at this time. I'm sure they'll still be around. But so when a working group produces a spec and it wants to advance in the stages, one of the things that has to happen is wide review and it's sent out. You have to have as part of the process internationalization, security, privacy reviews, accessibility reviews. So it's all part of this thing, like you were saying called wide review.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, we look for the minority report. Before I learned about the movie, the minority report in the context of the W3C work was that small amount of voices which were all saying the same things, which was quite different from the majority report, and we tried to make that match. So the staff at W3C have the expertise to foster the right conversations to happen. Hinging on something which we call the W3C process document, which is specification as well and specifies how specifications are made so it's very meta. The staff has the expertise to lead the working groups through that, in addition to having the overview of the rest of the working groups so as to use their position as staff contacts to just make sure that things go the right way or give the right flags at the right time. That's what we do.
Brian Kardell: So you mentioned sustainability and human rights. You had told me that you did some volunteer work, Red Cross volunteer work in [inaudible 00:41:19]. Tell me about that.
Coralie Mercier: That was before my work time actually. That was when I was still at school. My twin brother brought me in it. He said, 'Oh, it's fun, we'll do some volunteer work at the Red Cross, helping people, learning also new things.' And so that started several years of me going every week or every month at the Red Cross and becoming part of a community. It was then that I started to think, 'Oh, when I grow up, when I'm an adult, I want to work for a humanitarian NGO and I want to travel and help people.' One of the things I also did learn there was to give first aid and to handle crisis. And as part of the training that I got there, I learned about such thing as triage, and choosing the right priorities given compared to any situation or context. That has helped me immensely. I did not know then, of course, that it would become helpful to me, but it shaped a number of the ways I approach things. And later, many years later, I was doing some kind of assessment of my career, and the guy I was doing that with told me after three weeks of consulting every week, you are right where you need to be, you wanted to do humanitarian work, you are doing some kind of humanitarian work. I realized, yeah, that's right. I remember from many years ago when we used to say W3C is the United Nations of the Web. I don't think that analogy continues to be true, but it was really true as then, circa 2000 maybe. So yeah, I think I'm right where I want to be. I continue to be in awe of the mission that we have. We are non-profit. We operated like one before, although we were not. So yeah, things are falling into place.
Brian Kardell: What is an effort or two that, if you can say this, if you can't, that's fine, but that you saw come through that stalled or is hung up or just never came to fruition or whatever that you thought, boy, that was really exciting? Without plugging for a group or technology or anything, but just an idea, or is there anything?
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I can think of two, and one, I probably want to go deeper than the other, but I remember from years ago, we were hopeful to be able to have an influence in policy. We wanted to charter a policy interest group, which was going to look at, it was many years ago, like 2008 or something like this. It was expected to look at ethical things, and that's the kind of policy work that we wanted to do, just to make sure that technical standards were technical and policy met basically.
Brian Kardell: That's really interesting.
Coralie Mercier: Could be that this chapter, which was never published, may see the light of day, I don't know. Or maybe we do this differently, but at the technical level and feature levels, one thing which I've been keen about is monetization off and on the web for the web ecosystem on the one hand, but also for the individuals using it or leaving off it. So yeah, I remember micropayments, the efforts in micropayments and micro donations. Yes, that's something that I continue to be interested in.
Brian Kardell: So if anybody has read my recent blog, you know that preparation for this is where that came from, because Coralie sent me a hole to fall down and I just fell and just kept falling. And then eventually she sent me a text that said, 'You're buried far down in the hole.' Maybe I would like a rope instead of another lane.
Coralie Mercier: Instead of mornings. Yeah, you were very surprised that micropayments was work area at W3C even before I joined in 1998. In 1997.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, so thanks so much. I hope that this is interesting to other people. If not, anytime I get to chat with you, I have a great time.
Coralie Mercier: Me too.
Brian Kardell: I'll see you next week, I guess.
Coralie Mercier: Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you. Thank you for having me, Brian.
Brian Kardell
Coralie Mercier