26 awardees in W3C’s TPAC Inclusion and Invited Expert Support funds

For the 8th year in a row, we are coordinating an Inclusion Fund ahead of TPAC 2025, our annual conference, and for the first time we are expanding it to include a W3C Invited Experts support fund. The goal is to reduce barriers for participants who are contributing positively to the work of W3C groups, but who require financial support to be more actively involved.

The funding initiatives contribute to the W3C stakeholder strategy, as outlined in the 2025-2028 Strategic Objectives and Initiatives. This is being spearheaded by Sylvia Cadena, who I hired as Chief Development Officer last year. We were able to secure nearly US$ 70,000 through sponsorships by W3C, GoDaddy, Igalia, Microsoft, as well as donations and a contribution that people can choose to add when registering to TPAC 2025.

To better align with our stakeholder strategy objective, the eligibility criteria this time put the emphasis on established contributors, in particular editors, chairs and those participating in elected bodies. Prioritization continued unchanged: under-represented groups, to improve diversity of background, gender, experiences, expertise and skills.

We received 67 applications. 26 matched the eligibility criteria, passed our screening, and were approved by our selection committee. We were able to allocate funding in a 50/50 split (13 awardees in the TPAC Inclusion Fund, 13 awardees in the Invited Expert Support Fund). This year we were able to fund almost 4 times as many awards than all previous 7 years combined!

There was significant interest from applicants who were overall very diverse. We can report there is equitable balance among the awardees, with broad under-represented groups/region/gender representation:

• 15 women, 9 men and 2 gender-diverse individuals.
• 12 from Europe (6 economies), 10 from North America (2 from Canada and 8 from the United States) and 4 from Asia Pacific.
• 4 experts are originally from or had experience working in economies from the global majority.
• 19 experts are independent, while the other 7 are employed by W3C members but were not able to secure funding support from their employer.
• Several of the experts are people living with a disability, and the fund will provide additional support in that regard.

Within the awardees we noted a wide representation of skills and knowledge, with a good mix of technical expertise — including some with rare skills — and UX design expertise, The group also includes a number of people with lived experience of disability, which is critical for W3C’s web accessibility work. The group also includes individuals contributing to our security and privacy work.

Sheila Moussavi (PWE CG), Hidde de Vries (AB), Matthew Atkinson (TAG) and Tamsin Ewing (W3C Team) served in the selection committee, and I want to thank them for their support. The initial screening was conducted by Team members, Coralie Mercier, Christine Gefaell and Sylvia.

This effort is one facet of our Stakeholder Outreach strategy, which calls for improving our overall effectiveness through reinforcement of relationships with existing stakeholders as well as new relationships that can help further advance our mission.

TPAC is one venue where the work of our groups is accelerated. We hope that all 26 awardees can participate at TPAC 2025 and that they experience a fulfilling event and find a way to stay engaged in the work. With such diverse skills and backgrounds, their contributions will certainly lead to better and more inclusive design, increase the quality of participation, collaboration and discussion at TPAC 2025 and beyond.

We want to encourage donations and sponsors to boost their financial contributions for the continuation of these efforts, so that we are able to open our work to more people, aiming ultimately to address the representation and participation gaps that prevent the diversity of the whole world to be reflected in web standards. We invite you to contribute generously.