[HN Gopher] W3C's transfer from MIT to non-profit going poorly
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W3C's transfer from MIT to non-profit going poorly
Author : andruby
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-12-17 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| pmontra wrote:
| W3C members list at https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List and
| team https://www.w3.org/People
|
| What would be the impact of the USA part of the team shutting
| down? The big USA companies will still be there and will keep
| advancing their agendas. What the rest of the world can do?
| sinistersnare wrote:
| Easier Thread to read than Twitter:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603834995830816769.html
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Man MIT seems to really be losing its clout (PR capital)
| especially in the last decade or so. (And I am not usually one to
| participate in the "dumping on prestigious institutions" meme
| that's grown in popularity as well.)
|
| This is obviously one sided, but assuming most of this is
| factual... not good.
| adambyrtek wrote:
| Their handling of the Aaron Swartz case (rightfully) caused a
| massive hit to their reputation.
| ilamont wrote:
| That's right. The "Skoltech" program was one such initiative,
| basically taking hundreds of millions from the Skolkovo
| Foundation (run by Oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, a member of
| Putin's inner circle) in 2010 in return for setting up the
| Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology near Moscow.
| Despite getting a lot of heat for this, MIT kept it going:
|
| _The university in 2019 signed a five-year extension of its
| lucrative partnership with the Russian technology research
| institute, which has long raised espionage fears among foreign
| policy experts and the FBI. The extension came just three
| months after the federal government announced it was
| investigating MIT's compliance with reporting requirements for
| the Russian money it had received in connection with the
| project._
|
| The article notes MIT only ended the cooperation after the
| invasion of Ukraine.
|
| https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons...
| armchairhacker wrote:
| MIT has a beautiful campus and many great papers and
| organizations have come from its past, but it has this
| reputation as the ultimate CS research hub which houses all of
| the smartest people and creates all the discoveries and
| inventions of the future.
|
| My understanding is that besides its reputation and the fact
| everyone knows about it, MIT is fundamentally not really
| different than any other great tech university. And many big
| universities are starting to turn more into businesses. The
| "admins have seized the Ivory Tower" (https://news.ycombinator.
| com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.c...) applies to MIT as well.
| mlinksva wrote:
| It apparently started out fundamentally different though
| https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/a-progress-studies-
| history...
| KMag wrote:
| Having graduated from MIT, I would say that the Great Dome
| and other buildings surrounding Killian Court are beautiful.
| I don't particularly care for the modern architecture that
| makes up the rest of the campus, but I'm also not a
| connoisseur of architecture.
|
| At least 20 years ago, MIT's greatest strength was its
| student body and its culture. You got the sense everyone was
| striving to learn as much as they could, and most students
| reveled a bit in their nerdiness. In high school, I took
| classes at a well-regarded state school, and didn't get the
| same sense of intellectual hunger. IHTFP (simultaneously I
| Have Truly Found Paradise and I Hate This F'ing place) summed
| up culture pretty well. You got the sense that you and
| everyone else had lined up to drink from the fire hose, and
| were going to struggle through it together, and come out the
| other side better for it. I have several friends who got grey
| patches in their hair during undergrad from stress, that went
| away shortly after graduation and didn't show up again for
| another 15 or 20 years.
|
| I hope that pressure cooker feeling isn't actually necessary
| for rigor. I hope MIT has found some way to keep the rigor
| while being a bit more easy on the mental health of the
| students. MIT ensured every month had at least one holiday by
| inserting one fake Monday holiday in each month without a
| holiday, as a mental health break. I heard the mental health
| breaks were a result of the high suicide rate in the 1980s.
| Thankfully, none of my friends committed suicide, but a few
| friends of friends committed suicide in my time.
| dinvlad wrote:
| There's also this interesting mix of humbleness and
| ambitiousness, with the real feeling of "everyone can
| change the world" by actually doing fantastic things,
| instead of boasting about their skills. It sorta feels like
| a place where the engineers are superheroes.
|
| It's a bit tragic that a lot of times this comes at the
| cost of mental health, though MIT has gone a long way to
| improve that.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > MIT ensured every month had at least one holiday by
| inserting one fake Monday holiday in each month without a
| holiday, as a mental health break.
|
| They also made freshman year courses pass or fail.
| bawolff wrote:
| What does the w3c do that actually requires money? Are standard
| editors actually paid? I always assumed that they were
| volunteering their time on behalf of whatever company they worked
| for.
|
| For that matter, what liabilities are we talking about here?
| Hosting a website? Maybe i am just naive, but what else is there?
| simonw wrote:
| https://www.w3.org/People has a list of 57 people and what
| their role is - it's not clear to me if they are all full time
| paid staff but I think most of them are.
| allannienhuis wrote:
| Two people listed as CFO? <shrug>
| IshKebab wrote:
| Wow who knew they had so many full time employees? To be
| honest I assumed it was entirely volunteers & people employed
| at other companies, like the C++ standards committee.
| aliljet wrote:
| These kinds of threads are always so hard to decipher. Without
| disclosing the terms and details MIT is allegedly providing, you
| just have to assume the one side complaining is telling the truth
| when there's almost certainly two sides to this problem.
|
| That said, don't get me wrong, I'm always down for a quick pitch
| fork roast on the internet.
| bsder wrote:
| Normally when things have reached the "Air it in public" level
| of greivance, what is being put out in public is at least
| factual--just probably not _all_ of the facts.
|
| However, I can quite easily see this happening on the MIT side.
| Some mid-level bureaucrat who doesn't even know what W3C is
| will be losing budget, so they're playing hardball assuming the
| usual level of scrutiny. They're going to get a surprise when
| they get dumped on by their managers because this suddenly hit
| a lot of eyeballs and is garnering negative PR for the _entire_
| university.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That's partly because twitter is just about the worst possible
| place to have a detailed conversation on an issue, really just
| about any issue.
|
| I have no idea why anyone of any level of technical
| sophistication or containing halfway decent communication
| skills makes the attempt. Choose a free blog, write something
| more substantive, and write a succinct Twitter post to get
| people aware of it. Or at least do that at the same time you
| post a balkanized "thread" like the author here and link to the
| more substantive post in the process.
| mattl wrote:
| People aren't reading random blogs as much as they're reading
| social media
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| This is interesting.
|
| MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets.
|
| W3C is playing hardball MIT's reputation.
|
| I think the fact it's reached the point they're publically
| talking about this means they're is very little chance MIT is
| going to be backing down. The real question for me is would US
| officals allow W3C to move aboard. Could they prevent it? I have
| a feeling MIT's lawyers have thought alot of this out already.
| justin66 wrote:
| > W3C is playing hardball {with} MIT's reputation.
|
| It's more like softball, if we're being honest. 99.9% of the
| public doesn't care, and of the small portion of the public who
| is familiar with both MIT and W3C... I'll just predict that
| nobody is going to show up and protest, or bring torches and
| pitchforks, or anything because of twitter threads. Nobody is
| going to cut MIT's funding because of this, and they'd have to
| really cut in order to make MIT reconsider dumping what must be
| a money-loser for them already.
|
| Really playing hardball with MIT's reputation would involve
| getting Tim Berners-Lee in front of the mainstream press to
| talk about this.
|
| > MIT is playing hardball with people's jobs and W3C assets.
|
| _That_ is hardball.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > _" The real question for me is would US officals allow W3C to
| move aboard."_
|
| I think moving abroad would simply massively backfire on W3C -
| it would turn them from an org struggling to stay relevant into
| a completely irrelevant org immediately.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| The W3C always had "branches" in US, EU and Asia. What could be
| at stake here is to not have an entity in the US anymore.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| And I'm wondering if the US goverment which is a bit of a
| control freak, would allow there not to be any W3C under
| their control? Especially, if the major players in the tech
| world are US entities. I could see this just breaking up and
| ending the W3C more than the W3C having leverage.
| largepeepee wrote:
| My understanding is that ivy league schools have impossibly huge
| coffers, and this seems to boil down to money.
|
| Or perhaps MIT is offering a bad deal on purpose to sink
| negotiations?
| astura wrote:
| MIT isn't in the Ivy League. The Ivy League, which is an
| athletic conference, consists of Brown University, Columbia
| University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard
| University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania,
| and Yale University.
| socrates1024 wrote:
| How big are its coffers though?
|
| - Mit: $26.4B
|
| - Yale: $42.3B
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment
| https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007
| fmajid wrote:
| Endowments are independently run and the last thing the
| money men would do is give the admins or academics a say,
| or they'd fritter it all in short order, like how Larry
| Summers lost Harvard a cool billion dollars through ill-
| judged investment strategies for its operating funds.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I don't think they do? They have large endowments, but they
| have to preserve those mostly, and the number of things they
| have to pay for is huge. They're still run like an organization
| that has to be accountable to its budget.
|
| Also, MIT isn't Ivy League, technically.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| It's worse than that, most endowment funds are earmarked for
| specific purposes.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Note that OP (Robin Berjon) works for Filecoin, a crypto project
| that raised a huge ICO and has never really delivered on all of
| the promised hype. His full-time role is to get Filecoin's
| projects more embedded into standards like those the w3c
| oversees. And they obviously have specific opinions about how
| they'd like to see the w3c run.
|
| I would take a skeptical view of his take on what's happening.
| The w3c is a very dysfunctional organization and there has been a
| lot of turmoil internally. Jeff Jaffe who had been CEO for more
| than a decade quit in November. There are power plays behind the
| scenes to fill this vacuum.
| graycat wrote:
| Looks like the long time CEO of the W3C resigned in November,
| 2022. Hmm ....
| uwuemu wrote:
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(page generated 2022-12-17 23:00 UTC)