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The Internet

W3C Bars Public From Public Conference 169

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tricky-word-speak dept.
xk0der writes "Danny Weitzner, one of the W3C's policy directors and event co-chair, repeatedly claimed in a follow up telephone conversation that, by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public." Weitzner was the person who personally barred my colleague from entering the conference." The story is worth a read- it's very strange. Personally I think this guy is just vying to replace Tony Snow at the White House.
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W3C Bars Public From Public Conference

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  • public, who are invited (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bizzeh ( 851225 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:19AM (#19564625) Homepage
    its the same public as any other public thing like this... the general public can get an invite. but cannot walk in from the streets.

    • Re:public, who are invited (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:26AM (#19564705) Journal
      I was going to suggest that "public" means that discussions from the conference can be openly discussed afterwards, in contrast to some I've been to where the proceedings were confidential.

      But maybe you're right. The article is so vague and makes so little effort to explain the W3C's side that it only really serves as a platform for flamebait, which is how Taco seems to have decided to use it.

    • Re:public, who are invited (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @11:07AM (#19565215)
      Actually, in most countries, public means that the public can just walk in. It means open for everyone. The other invitation-only "Public", as you describe it is just the same as the Davos Conference hosted by the World Economic Forum. I think most people agree is NOT a very public Conference, although, they anyone who gets an invititation is welcome and they try to invite all who are relevant.
    • And what's up with the "won't be open with the press there".

      If the meeting can be discussed publicly after the meeting, then what they say is open to publication and discussion anyway.

      Unless they keep no notes and do not record the 'public' meeting.

      • Re:public, who are invited (Score:5, Informative)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @02:26PM (#19568079) Homepage
        I have an advantage here since I am actually in the meeting. For the reasons Declan in particular would be excluded, see my blog [blogspot.com]. Declan has a history of deliberately misrepresenting statements, in particular he was the origin of the myth that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet [snopes.com]. We are talking about using technology to support E-Government. Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights, but are not speaking for our companies. The history of why we built the Web 15 years ago are not something my employer would or should share. Anyone could attend the workshop, there isn't even an entry fee. All you had to do is to register in advance, to submit a position paper and to agree that the statements made are not for attribution. This is incidentally the press terms that the IETF operates on, we do not speak for our employers at the IETF.

        • Re:public, who are invited (Score:4, Insightful)

          by PoderOmega ( 677170 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @04:17PM (#19569913)
          Although I do understand that this was actually "by invitation only" and only the results were public, I think your argument that the reporter was known for misrepresentations is irrelevant. If there is a truly public you can't selectively throw out people who may or may not be total liars.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by Zeinfeld ( 263942 )
            Although I do understand that this was actually "by invitation only" and only the results were public, I think your argument that the reporter was known for misrepresentations is irrelevant. If there is a truly public you can't selectively throw out people who may or may not be total liars.

            There are two issues here. First no press of any kind were invited so that people could speak off the record. Second the reason that no press was admitted was precisely because of journalists who follow their own agenda

            • If you are press, you are not the public.
              Since when? You sound like some P.R. flack. That attitude doesn't stand up in court. Public is public. It's been ruled dozens of times over in court cases about open records, open court proceedings, and open government meetings.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by putaro ( 235078 )
          For the reasons Declan in particular would be excluded, see my blog.
          Declan wasn't the reporter excluded. Anne Broache was the reporter excluded. Declan is reporting on her exclusion.

          Why would Anne Broache, in particular, be excluded?

        • Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights
          Geez... Welcome to Soviet Amerika.
          • Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights

            Geez... Welcome to Soviet Amerika.

            One of the consequences of SEC regulation is that if you are an employee of a public company and speak to the press on behalf of the company you can get into real trouble if you say the wrong thing, as in cause a lawsuit.

          • "Welcome to Soviet Amerika."

            So you think it is repressive, or even Fascist, for companies to be allowed to choose when and how they make public announcements? In extreme cases, the consequences of a single unguarded statement by any employee of a company to any representative of the media can be utterly disastrous to that company - and its employees, shareholders, suppliers, and even customers.

            That is why companies carefully choose public spokespersons, who usually have appropriate authority, knowledge, and

    • its the same public as any other public thing like this... the general public can get an invite. but cannot walk in from the streets.

      It's not just the public. You'd be surprised how many times organizations will put out press releases inviting the media to cover an event, then when the media shows up they lock the doors and say it's a private event even though they sent dozens of faxed invitations and filled up your voice mail to make sure you're coming. Then they get pissed that no one covered their eve

  • Orwellian Doublespeak (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheWoozle ( 984500 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:22AM (#19564657)

    Weitzner, a lawyer and Washington insider before moving to the W3C, said making an event discussing government transparency less transparent was necessary because government officials could then speak more freely "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say." "There are times when in order to have an open exchange of ideas, you need to provide an off-the-record environment, which is what we did," Weitzner said.

    So now we can add "Secrecy is Transparency" to the list.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by UbuntuDupe ( 970646 ) *
      Yes, so we have:

      "public" means "non-public"

      "secret" is "transparent", and, don't forget:

      Weitzner was the person who personally barred my colleague from entering the conference."

      "Personally barred" means "impersonally barred" ;-)

      • The Doctor sez: (Score:5, Funny)

        by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @11:55AM (#19565827)
        "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by jc42 ( 318812 )
          "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"

          Yeah; and by country I assume you mean Merry Old(e) England, since "inflammable" dates to the mid-1300s. The shortened form "flammable"
          wasn't invented for five more centuries, in the mid-1800s.

          Similarly, doctors treat inflammations, not flammations. And politicians
          make inflammatory remarks about their opponents, not flammatory remarks.

          And when something has finished burning, it has been incinerated, not
          cinerated. This use of in- as a prefix meaning "in" or "in

          • English did make it a bit confusing by also using in- as a negative. The two in- prefixes have different etymologies.

            Not that this helps much. Pity the poor foreigner trying to learn our insane language. ;-)

            English, as such a Crazy Language [amazon.com] , may be the hardest language for nonspeakers to learn. Afterall if the pural of "tooth" is "teeth" then why isn't the plural of "booth" "beeth"? Then again Chinese is pretty difficult as well, as is Japanese. Written Chinese has more than 66,000 ideograms [wikipedia.org] repr

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jc42 ( 318812 )
              English ... may be the hardest language for nonspeakers to learn.

              Some time back, in another forum I asked about this. English seems to be a close competitor of both Japanese and Korean. In all three cases, this seems to be mostly due to their illogical, only-slightly-phonetic writing systems. English may be the most annoying one of the three, because all the other European languages have had major spelling reforms in the past century or so that gave them decent spelling systems. The only holdout is Engli

              • "Chinese language" is a term on a par with "Romance language" or "Germanic language". "Chinese" is about a dozen closely-related languages. Calling them all "Chinese" is a lot like calling French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian all just "Latin".

                True, it's only been recently, the past 100 or so years, that there has been "1" unified language in either China or the European countries. In Germany it's called High German, or it was, but the German that's spoken colloquially in northern Germany is

            • Afterall if the pural of "tooth" is "teeth" then why isn't the plural of "booth" "beeth"? Then again Chinese is pretty difficult as well, as is Japanese.

              Yeah, what a bitch that English still keeps a few irregular plurals. Never mind that French also has irregular plurals. Never mind that French has irregular *adjectives*. Never mind that French verbs have more distinct forms, so there's more to remember about a verb irregularity. Never mind that French orthography itself is pretty messed up (last four c

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jc42 ( 318812 )
                Actually, it's fairly well understood by linguists that all "natural" human languages have approximately the same amount of "complexity" (however you like to define that). English threw out most of the old Indo-European inflection system (noun cases, verb tenses, gender markers, etc.), but it trade, it has an unusually large number of irregularities in what is left. Most common nouns have irregular plurals, most common verbs have irregular past tense forms, etc.

                The only real exceptions to this general pat

              • Yeah, what a bitch that English still keeps a few irregular plurals. Never mind that French also has irregular plurals. Never mind that French has irregular *adjectives*. Never mind that French verbs have more distinct forms, so there's more to remember about a verb irregularity. Never mind that French orthography itself is pretty messed up (last four consonants are optional!).

                And depending on what gender the subject is, verbs are conjegated differently. If I recall right there are 6 different conjegati

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rthille ( 8526 )
            Oh pleaze, our language isn't insane...

            It's just a _tool_ for making _people_ insane. :-)

    • Re:Orwellian Doublespeak (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) * <.ten.yxox. .ta. .nidak.todhsals.> on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:27AM (#19564719) Homepage Journal
      I can understand what they're doing, but calling it "public" is a load of crock. It's a closed session. They should call it that.

      If you want to bar the press, bar the press -- but don't say it's a "public" meeting, because that's a bald-faced lie. (Anyone know how to translate that concept into Washingtonese?)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RingDev ( 879105 )
        I'm not sure of the exact term, but I believe it would fall under a "Strategic Initiative" of some type.

        -Rick

      • Re:Orwellian Doublespeak (Score:4, Funny)

        by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:41AM (#19564925)
        "Bald-faced lie"? I think that translates to 'standard operating procedure' in Washingtonese.
      • BFL == Press release.
      • >because that's a bald-faced lie. (Anyone know how to translate that concept into Washingtonese?)

        "marketing" or "advertising" or "spin" or "public relations" comes to mind.
      • The concept could be described as "supporting an inexactitude," but that nomenclature is no longer supported, as it did not include the possibility of surmise or supposition. The preferred reference would be "expressing something that is counter-factual," which would then be useful in that it would allow for an incorrect thing to not necessarily be a matter of blame.

    • Re:Orwellian Doublespeak (Score:5, Interesting)

      by abb3w ( 696381 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @12:12PM (#19566059) Journal

      So now we can add "Secrecy is Transparency" to the list.

      Can we add "Assassination is a Political Contribution" yet?

  • Call TBL (Score:2, Funny)

    by xmedar ( 55856 )
    He'll sort it out over a nice pot of tea, and perhaps some scones.

  • I warned them... (Score:5, Funny)

    by eln ( 21727 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:28AM (#19564743)
    This is the sort of thing that happens when you make announcements on Opposite Day.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by sharkey ( 16670 )
      Unless you're in a Boomerang Zone, whereupon the opposite'd announcement gets turned back to the original. Until someone bonks you with the Calvinball, anyway.

  • Single Paragraph (Score:5, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:31AM (#19564777) Homepage Journal

    Weitzner, a lawyer and Washington insider before moving to the W3C, said making an event discussing government transparency less transparent was necessary because government officials could then speak more freely "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say."

    And that pretty much sums up the entire event. As the invitations said, only the results of the event will be public. Thus the reporter in question is proving Weitzner's point by twisting the words to create this story.

    Here's what the W3C page says [w3.org]:

    Position papers received for the Workshop will be posted publicly on the Web. In addition, a final document summarizing the outcome of the Workshop and the suggested future actions, will be posted publicly. Conversations and results are public.


    TFA quotes part of that and says, "SEE? SEE? It's a PUBLIC event!" No, it's an event about the public that will have its results published to the public. Nowhere does it say that the event is open to the public.

    Sorry, there's no story here. Just lame reporters trying to make one.

    • Re:Single Paragraph (Score:5, Informative)

      by shawnce ( 146129 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:38AM (#19564879) Homepage
      It does state that the workshop doesn't require W3C membership but participants require registration... so did this reporter register? (note registration window closed on the 7th of June)

      http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/eGov-policy [w3.org]

      "Space is limited and priority for registration is given to those who have submitted position papers. If you request registration without sending a position paper we suggest that you wait to make any non-refundable travel arrangements."
      "W3C membership is not required in order to participate in the Workshop."
      "The total number of participants will be limited. To ensure diversity, a limit might be imposed on the maximum number of participants per organization."
      • The article quotes the chairman as saying that reporters would have been turned away anyway.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shawnce ( 146129 )
          "Jointly sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), this workshop will bring together government officials, computer scientists and other academics specializing in both technical and legal eGovernment issues, leaders in the Web standards community, as well as a wide range of companies providing products and services in the government marketplace." (http://www.w3.org/2007/eGov/eGov-policy-cfp)

          I don't see reporters or general public listed. So turning away
    • If the results are truly so open, that makes me wonder why they don't want journalists. The stated reason quoted from the chairman doesn't really seem to cover it well enough.
      • To play devil's advocate, if I were organising an event like this with restricted space then I would rather every chair had someone who wanted to turn up and participate in it. Journalists are just there to tell other people what happened, not to contribute. If there was space left over, then maybe let some in, but don't exclude people with a contribution to make in favour of people who want to write about the contributions of others.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Intron ( 870560 )
          But the reason he gave was not limited space, it was to allow government attendees to talk freely.

          If you really want to enlarge your audience, why would you exclude journalists? The real reason was to limit the scope, not to broaden it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fataugie ( 89032 )
      Conversations and results are public.


      Except, isn't this exactly what wasn't going to be made public?

      I don't really give a shit one way or the other. What pisses me off is that the guy in charge can't just say the truth. If you fucked up on the website, say so. You're not that good of a salesman to try that doubletalk bullcrap and get away with it.
    • I think you're just farming for karma.

      Of course the FA says documents will be public and the results and all that, but the point of the FA and the point of this discussion for that matter is why go through the trouble of making all that public if you're going to keep the public out of it.

      We're gonna be passed the results without having to say our word on it.

      its as if the GPL wasn't really open source, sure its open, here's the pseudo code and the graph depicting how it works but we're gonna keep the actual

      • I think you're just farming for karma.

        Bullshit. I happen to be one of the few people around here that cares about the truth. And the truth is that this story (and many others) are overblown non-events.

        Of course the FA says documents will be public and the results and all that, but the point of the FA and the point of this discussion for that matter is why go through the trouble of making all that public if you're going to keep the public out of it.

        Because it's a meeting of minds, not a public event. It simp

        • At least ill be a man about it and ill say that i responded too quickly, you were absolutely right.

          I read the whole thing diagonally and miss the part that sais prior registration was required but membership not required for registration.

          So, there you go, im sorry. i just happen to sort of sensitive about all the net neutrality stuff and government trying to regulate the internet. when i first read the thing, it didnt feel right.
        • I believe you.

          There is a certain truthiness to what you say.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jc42 ( 318812 )
        Of course the FA says documents will be public and the results and all that, but the point of the FA and the point of this discussion for that matter is why go through the trouble of making all that public if you're going to keep the public out of it.

        Actually, there's a great deal of precedent for this sort of approach. For example, the folks who developed usenet learned very early that they needed "moderated" discussions. For those not familiar with the term, this means a discussion that is visible to th
    • The text in that paragraph is certainly ambiguous; it can easily mean either that the conversations are to take place publicly, or that they will be made public, with no clear definition of when that is to take place (in that paragraph).

      Give that part of the reason for the event appears to be for government officials to speak freely, I can easily see why they would want to limit participation and observation, especially by the media. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether that's good or bad, but it'

  • W3C's purpose? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:32AM (#19564797)
    Public or not, what exactly is the W3C doing organizing a conference on Government Transparency in the first place? Shouldn't they be working towards the next set of standards for the Web or something? Or are they losing focus and trying to become the regulators of everything that touches the Web?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RingDev ( 879105 )
      That's my question as well. Who cares about some government official's anonymity. It's the W3C, not a senate judiciary hearing.

      -Rick

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      Nope, they are working on their plan to sue web browser viewers in order to pay royalties to the poor web artists.

      They are going to start by suing grandmothers and children found to be sharing the dangerous links to their artists' intellectual property.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kopretinka ( 97408 )

      Public or not, what exactly is the W3C doing organizing a conference on Government Transparency in the first place? Shouldn't they be working towards the next set of standards for the Web or something? Or are they losing focus and trying to become the regulators of everything that touches the Web?

      It was a workshop, not a conference - difference not only in size. The W3C organizes workshops in order better to judge where standards work should be going, or where the W3C should provide guidance.

      The W3C is a

  • Couldn't they just call it a protected conference and get a conference that's private to the unwashed masses and public to objects of types that are friends of W3C? I mean, that's what the keyword is there for.
  • by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public."

    Although I will completely agree this behavior sounds like an egregious example of doublespeak, I can't help but ponder...

    "So what?"

    All of my own web pages still start with "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">", which I consider just about the last thing the W3C did of any significance to the rest of the world outside their own little social/political clique. If they want to hold opaque conferences on government tra

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )
      All of my own web pages still start with "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"&gt>", which I consider just about the last thing the W3C did of any significance to the rest of the world outside their own little social/political clique.

      Actually, I tend to think of that as the first sign that they'd gone off the rails. Since all HTML docs started with <HTML> already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text. The correct modification would have been to allow <HTML version=

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Arimus ( 198136 )
        Other than the fact servers can server more than just html docs?

        I do agree though that sticking it in SEEMS like redundant information/duplication but the two tags serve different roles in life...

        The HTML tag tells the browser this is the start of the html section of the document, render everything between here and the closing tag as html.
        The doctype tag tells the browser what sort of document to expect - HTML, XML, FREDSNEWDOCTYPE etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nagora ( 177841 )
          The doctype tag tells the browser what sort of document to expect - HTML, XML, FREDSNEWDOCTYPE etc.

          Yeah, right. It's a web browser, if it's not expecting HTML then it needs fixed. The mime-type is already there to indicate other document types are being served. It's just more XML wank.

          TWW

          • Yeah, right. It's a web browser, if it's not expecting HTML then it needs fixed.

            Several things:

            • The DOCTYPE directive is an SGML construct; HTML (up through version 4) is an SGML application, and the DOCTYPE directive is (one method) used to indicate to SGML tools how they should process a given document.
            • Web browsers are expected to handle a variety of SGML- and XML-derived (and XML is itself an SGML application) formats already, including things like RSS and Atom feeds and SVG images, as well as a

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nagora ( 177841 )
              The DOCTYPE directive is an SGML construct; HTML (up through version 4) is an SGML application, and the DOCTYPE directive is (one method) used to indicate to SGML tools how they should process a given document.

              I'll grant you that this is one of the basic design mistakes in HTML - it should never have been SGML, but it's a mistake easily fixed in the way I suggested above.

              Web browsers are expected to handle a variety of SGML- and XML-derived

              Maybe by you; I prefer my web browser to handle HTML and only H

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by vidarh ( 309115 )
                Thanks for playing. Meanwhile in the real world a large part of the web content normal users want to access are in formats you consider useless and "plain shit" because people who actually need to get things done and turn a profit doing it have found them to work well and provide significant benefits.
              • RSS is a joke

                Your browser doesn't handle RSS. MSIE7 handles RSS. RSS is popular. Ergo to the general public MSIE7 is superior in this regard to your browser.


                XML is just plain shit designed by idiots who can't handle BNF. Bin it.

                Wait, I'll tell everyone. I'm pretty sure the whole world will just stop using XML and switch to your proposed document format (you DO have a superior alternative, right?) in a week.


                A pointless exercise in the extreme. Buggy rendering should be eliminated as quickly as po

      • Since all HTML docs started with already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text. The correct modification would have been to allow instead. I mean, what type of document did they expect to find inside HTML tags?

        HTML, or some other derivative of SGML [wikipedia.org], such as XML. See HTML DTD [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nagora ( 177841 )
          HTML, or some other derivative of SGML, such as XML. See HTML DTD.

          XML is junk and undeserving of the attention of any serious programmer. Badly designed with goals that could all be achieved by much older and well established methods in a more efficient way. Total garbage. It should be left out some winter night to die.

          TWW

          • I think that those that feel so strongly averse to XML don't understand it. Undoubtedly, RSS (used in web feeds), RDF + XUL (used throughout Firefox), and SVG (used in Firefox, Opera, and Safari) have proven that XML is not "undeserving of the attention of any serious programmer." Heck, I just got done with a session of playing Civ4, whose mechanics and interface are fully customizable using Python and XML.

            I'm not sure exactly what your issue with it is--you didn't specify--but if it is the excessive size o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jc42 ( 318812 )
        Since all HTML docs started with already, the doctype is a pointless piece of text.

        Well, if you think of HTML as a one-off creation unrelated to anything else in the universe, you're right. But actually, HTML is a dialect of SGML (and not a very well-conforming dialect, either). SGML had been around for some decades by the time HTML was devised, and HTML was consciously designed as a special case of SGML.

        That <!DOCTYPE ...> thingy is a standard SGML declaration stating information that clues SGML
  • apparently-insane double-speak W3C overlords.

    -WtC

  • Article is painfully vague (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @10:54AM (#19565063) Homepage Journal
    The article...er...blog entry is painfully vague, and even the summary fails to include a link to the W3Cs comments. Am I supposed to take a blogger's comments at face value, with only a few choice out-of-context quotes?

    There better be a Slashback article in response to this...

  • "Danny Weitzner, one of the W3C's policy directors and event co-chair, repeatedly claimed in a follow up telephone conversation that, by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public."
    Should I not then be able to assume that by "private" he would mean "open to the public."?
  • Time to change the "guard" at the W3C methinks. Idiots like this don't help in the promulgation of what are supposed to be open standards, and if there are govt. officials that are reticent to speak up in a truly public forum I can only ask them "Who do you think pays your salaries?".

  • Weitzner, a lawyer and Washington insider before moving to the W3C, said making an event discussing government transparency less transparent was necessary because government officials could then speak more freely "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say."


    Seems straight forward enough to me...

    -Bill

  • Oh boy... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Minute Work ( 749085 )
    Personally I think this guy is just vying to replace Tony Snow at the White House.

    Are the comments areas getting so full of Daily KOS 1-liners that they need to be spilled over into the headlines too?

    I expect that kind of thing in the forums, but it doesn't belong in my RSS feed.
    • I found that line pretty annoying. The summary itself is factually incorrect about the W3C event and to follow up with an insult to a W3C member is plain rude. That "zinger" is calling the person a liar when he did no such thing. This slashdot story needs a major editorial update including an apology.
  • I can understand the director's point - to get government officials to speak freely, they need assurance that their words won't be twisted into something that kills their funding/votes/public image/whatever.
    I can understand the point of the article - public!=not public. The description of the meeting was confusing at best, misleading at worst.
    Where the article lost credibility for me was the rant on location (more than once). Yes, it is in a federal building, payed for with taxpayer dollars. That doe
  • The Bilderberg group says that the meetings are closed to the public because they want free and candid discussions without the fear of the press twisting their words. In actuality, it's a forum where the world's 100 most powerful and influential people get together and make plans for us peons.

    Sounds like W3C is using a page out of the Bilderberg textbook. For shame.
  • As in "Transparent Sticky Tape", or NOT as in "Able to see through walls in order to observe the government."

    In other words: So you are unable to see what the government is doing. So they can sneak around behind your back and do bad things to you.
  • "without wondering how the press would interpret what they have to say."
    I see this a lot. The press reports what someone says, it's out of context and then everybody assume worst case, or speculate and then it becomes a pain in the ass for the person who did nothing wrong.

    That assumes the person reporting it didn't have a bias. I have seen selective quotes from government workers intentional put out of context. I have seen papers that have a known bias(specific political affiliation) and take quotes complet
  • Even if this whole article is stupid, I still have to love the idea of the w3c--a consortium of big companies that "care" about the web (to the extent that the browser creators went off and formed their own w3c-independent working group to make new standards)--caring about transparency, about public accessibility.

    I have to love it, because it was almost 10 years ago I noticed a problem with an algorithm recommended in the HTML specification and went to w3c.org and couldn't figure out any way to tell them

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