Web Platform Collective aims to empower web stakeholders of all sizes to have their web platform pain points addressed and to make independent standards work financially sustainable.

Our manifesto:

• We believe that all web stakeholders, small and large, should be able to fund web platform improvements that address their pain points without investing thousands of hours in understanding the (admittedly opaque and intimidating) web standards landscape or hiring full-time staff for this purpose.
• We believe that even smaller web stakeholders can benefit from solving their pain points directly in the web platform, rather than having to spend thousands or millions working around them ad infinitum.
• We believe that web platform design is critical, highly impactful work, and doing it well is an extremely rare, interdisciplinary skill drawing on skills and knowledge from many different disciplines such as product management, software engineering, HCI, and more. Therefore, we believe that independent web platform designers should be able to earn a sustainable living doing what they do best — advancing the web — without being forced to choose between unpaid side work and employment at a browser vendor (which suits some, but not all).

We work with organizations of any size to listen to their pain points and create an individualized plan to address them, depending on:

1. Status: Are there existing solutions for this pain point, and what is their implementation status?
2. Budget: How much are you willing to invest to address said pain point? This can range from a few hours of work to several months, and from one person exploring the problem space and writing a proposal to user research, spec writing, tests, docs¹, developer outreach, implementation in browsers¹ etc, the sky is the limit. Obviously, the larger the investment, the higher the odds of success and the shorter the timeline.
3. Scope: Would addressing the pain point require a small improvement to an existing feature, or a whole new web technology? The larger the scope, the higher the risk.

The core founding team includes highly experienced web standards designers and architects with a proven track record and deep tenure across multiple standards groups, review bodies such as the TAG and the W3C Advisory Board, and broad, hands-on expertise spanning multiple web platform areas.

We also collaborate with a larger network of independent web platform designers who bring specialized expertise in particular technologies.

Neither! We do not aim to replace venues for standardization, like W3C, WHATWG, TC39, etc. We envision the Web Platform Collective as a change agent in those spaces, engaging relevant parties there to drive progress on various features on behalf of diverse web stakeholders and drawing from our breadth of expertise to connect the dots and unify efforts across different standards groups.

Both! All web platform work is public benefit work, regardless of the driver behind it. Nobody can push a web platform feature forwards that does not broadly benefit web developers and users, it will simply get rejected.

Some of our work may be driven by a specific company’s needs, similar to an agency. Other work may come from our own gap analysis and then collaboratively funded by multiple web stakeholders, which is closer to a nonprofit model. But the web platform improvements that stem from either model benefit everyone.

When looking at web standards timelines from the outside, it often seems like the process is slow. However, in most cases, work stalls because no-one is driving it forward, not because of inherent resistance or dysfunction.

When standards work is well funded (and sometimes even when it isn't), it can move pretty fast. There are many success stories of major web technologies going from conception to baseline in less than two years (e.g. CSS Cascade Layers), and smaller features in a matter of months. This is shorter than many product development cycles!

Yes, it’s not instant. You’ll still have to work around the limitation for a little bit more. But how you work around it can be very different:

• Progressive enhancement: Many web features can add value even before they are implemented in all browsers, through polyfills and/or progressive enhancement.
• Strategy: Knowing what the web platform landscape will look like in the near-future can help you make better product decisions today, and give you a leg up over competitors.

If you want to get involved, either to get your own web platform pain points addressed or to join us, please get in touch at hello at webplatform.design.