Internationalization Working Group
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Mission

Gather and make available requirements for the support of local writing systems and languages on the Web.

Provide internationalization advice to other groups developing Web standards, and review their specifications (mostly W3C groups, but we also get involved in Unicode, IDN, IETF and other work).

Develop education and outreach materials to make the internationalization aspects of W3C technology better understood and more widely and consistently used by content authors and implementers.

The project radar lists objectives for current WG work items.

Project Radar

Organization

The chair of the Working Group is Addison Phillips.

The Working Group uses the mailing lists of the Internationalization Interest Group to disseminate notifications about ongoing work and meeting minutes. The language enablement work of the WG is supported by repositories and task forces that are formed under the umbrella of the Interest Group. Participation in the Interest Group and its task forces is open to all who are interested. Participation in the Working Group itself is limited to W3C members and invited experts.

Electronic communication

The main points of entry for information and news related to the work of the Internationalization Working Group are the home page and social networking channels.

I18n Home Page

@webi18n   

The news is also sent to various RSS feeds.

All technical discussion takes place in GitHub issues.

Lists of GitHub repositories and mail archives can be found in the list of groups. Check the group pages for information about how the lists are used.

Technical topics for which no GitHub issue list is appropriate can be discussed on the w3c/i18n-discuss GitHub issue list.

Meetings

How to participate

The Working Group (WG) is always looking for additional participants, to work on a very varied range of topics and interests. The group needs a variety of people with different skills, from technical authoring to specialised knowledge of particular technologies.

See a list of participation benefits for you and your organization, and some examples of what WG members do within the group.

Working group members are responsible for the development of the group's deliverables, so some minimum commitment is preferred, but we are flexible about this. We would expect you to keep up to date with the discussions on the public-i18n-core and www-international lists and respond in a timely manner when required.

We also prefer that you participate in weekly teleconferences and in face to face meetings as scheduled or send regrets to list.

We would like you participate in reviews and discussions of documents or specifications where you have an interest or expertise.

The Working Group has fingers in so many pies that it can be a little disorienting or confusing for new people at first. Your participation in the WG will be driven mostly by your own interests, so please look for areas where you are interested in contributing and feel free to volunteer or champion an area that is particularly interesting to you.

Participants in the working group are expected to observe the requirements of the Individual Participation Criteria in the W3C Process Document.

Join

If you are unable to make the required commitment to join the Working Group, you can still contribute in a number of ways. See Get involved in W3C Internationalization for ideas.

See a list of current WG participants.

Useful links

The folllowing links take you to pages that point to useful information, depending on your interests and role.

Linguistic experts

Spec developers & implementers

Content authors & developers

WG participants

What WG members do

Working Group members contribute in one or more of the following ways.

• Participate in discussions on the various mailing lists and during teleconferences.
• Review articles and documents prior to publication and send comments.
• Review W3C specifications for internationalization issues and forward to the group
• Coordinate notification and discussion of review issues with other Working Groups.
• Provide information about language or script usage in response to our feedback requests.
• Write articles explaining internationalization-related aspects of Web technologies, and plan and discuss content for forthcoming articles.
• Develop or review best practices, requirements, guidelines and other Working Group Notes for content authors, implementers, or specification developers.
• Help maintain techniques indexes and the language enablement index.
• Develop tests to help implementors and better understand what internationalization features are supported in browsers.
• Help respond to feedback on articles, etc.

What does reviewing a spec involve?

Choose specs you have an interest in or that you think may widen your awareness, and don't worry about revisiting recently reviewed specs and raising new issues if you spot any. See the review radar for suggestions.

The page How to review specs and raise issues that describes, step-by-step, how to raise issues as you review a spec.

For ideas of what to look for during a review see the Short i18n review checklist. Follow the links from there to the document Internationalization Best Practices for Spec Developers for detailed suggestions of things to look for, with explanations. (You can also generate a checklist of just the recommendations.)

Historical information