Candidate Statement for the 2022 TAG Election

Hi, I’m Tess. My pronouns are she/her. Is mise Treasa Ní Chonchúir. 你好!我叫ㄎㄤㄊㄜˋㄙㄨ我叫kāng はじめまして、オコーナーです。

I’m the AC rep for Apple, where I manage our Web Standards & Interoperability team. I’ve been doing standards work for almost twenty years and I’ve had the honor of serving on the TAG since 2018.

Over the last several years much of my professional focus has been on privacy. For the TAG I co-edit the Security and Privacy Questionnaire and serve on the Web Privacy Principles Task Force, which is tasked with documenting privacy principles for the Web. I’m also a co-chair of the Privacy Community Group, a CG with over 500 participants from over 150 organizations. Defending and improving Web privacy requires diligent work within each of our community and working groups, as well as vigilance in horizontal review from both PING and the TAG. I’m committed to using my time on the TAG to productively advance the cause of user privacy on the Web.

Design reviews are the lifeblood of the TAG and what we spend the vast majority of our time on. We endeavour to help anybody who asks us for advice on how best to fit their work into the rest of the Web platform, and we try to capture any lessons we learn along the way in the Web Platform Design Principles document. I’ve been involved in many reviews during my time on the TAG and I’m very proud of all the work we’ve put into them. There are a number of ways I think we could improve the consistency, thoroughness, and timeliness of our reviews. The TAG is a small committee spread across many time zones; I’d like to improve our ability to make progress on reviews asynchronously, to help each of us better fit our TAG responsibilities into our complex and varied schedules.

Speaking of which, the responsibilities of TAG participants are increasing due to Process changes taking place in anticipation of TimBL’s retirement. The TAG now spends a significant amount of time serving on W3C Councils to decide Formal Objections, and we’re also being asked to review upcoming charters. These additional responsibilities demand a somewhat different distribution of skills: a proven track record of diplomacy is essential; we need to be able to find consensus in a room despite strong personalities and intensely-held positions. Please keep this in mind as you cast your vote.

The TAG is more diverse than ever. But, as always, we can and must do more. This election, I hope the AC continues to prioritize seating a TAG of diverse backgrounds, identities, and lived experience.