My friend Amy Guy is running for election on the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group). The TAG is an unusual group that sets a lot of the direction of the future of standards that you and I use everyday on the web. Read their statement on running, and if you can, ie if you're one of those unusual people labeled as "AC Representative", please consider voting for them. (Due to the nature of the W3C's organizational and funding structure, only paying W3C Members tend to qualify... if you know you're working for an organization that has paying membership to the W3C, find out who the AC rep is and strongly encourage them to vote for Amy.)

So, why vote for Amy? Quite simply, they're running on a platform of putting the needs of users first. Despite all the good intents and ambitions of those who have done founding work in these spaces, this perspective tends to get increasingly pushed to the wayside as engineers are pressured to shift their focus on the needs of their immediate employers and large implementors. I'm not saying that's bad; sometimes this even does help advance the interest of users too, but... well we all know the ways in which it can end up not doing so. And I don't know about you, but the internet and the web have felt an awful lot at times like they've been slipping from those early ideals. Amy's platform shares in a growing zeitgeist (sadly, still in the wispiest of stages) of thinking and reframing from the perspective of user empowerment, privacy, safety, agency, autonomy. Amy's platform reminds me of RFC 8890: The Internet Is For End Users. That's a perspective shift we desperately need right now... for the internet and the web both.

That's all well and good for the philosophical-alignment angle. But what about the "Technical" letter in TAG? Amy's standing there is rock-solid. And I know because I've had the pleasure of working side-by-side with Amy on several standards (including ActivityPub, of which we are co-authors.

Several times I watched with amazement as Amy and I talked about some changes we thought were necessary and Amy just got in the zone, this look of intense hyperfocus (really, someone should record the Amy Spec Editing Zone sometime, it's quite a thing to see), and they refactored huge chunks of the spec to match our discussion. And Amy knows, and deeply cares, about so many aspects of the W3C's organization and structure.

So, if you can vote for, or know how to get your organization to vote for, an AC rep... well, I mean do what you want I guess, but if you want someone who will help... for great justice, vote Amy Guy to the W3C TAG!