I had a long involved post in response to this. Unfortunately I managed to somehow close the tab with Gmail on it, and lost a ranting diatribe. Now, that you've all breathed a sigh of relief, I'll attempt to recreate it more briefly
The article is a fishing expedition for funds. They are not asking for more Australian involvement, but more paying members. A typically no-content SMH 'article', this press-release is looking to hook some corporate exec who'll decide to sign his company up and cough up the $60k USD As for being 'too small', most of us are. As Richard has said, where do we get the money to become even affiliate members? I'm sure there are Australian members on this list who earn significant dosh (and that's great, anyone want to hire me?) but I figure they'd be too busy earning that money to make the necessary commitment to the W3C Of course, we (the WSG), could join. That would only cost us the approx $6k USD every year. I'm not sure that ours is the kind of organisation that wants annual fees, levels of membership and all the hoo-ha that goes along with that scenario - and I'm not sure where Russ and Peter would find the hours (or staff) to run an organisation of that scale So, that cuts out typical web dev companies, freelancers and grass-roots organisations, leaving only big name companies. A quick look at the W3C member list [1] shows that most members are global companies, and that nearly all have core businesses that depend on the internet. I don't know how many Australian global tech companies there are, but I don't think the number would be particularly high. (I'd love someone to correct me on that one!) I figure that with 5 members, we're actually doing okay. I'd like to see some stats on nationalities of the other members. I'd love to see if we are really boxing under our weight. I think you can be pretty sure that the range of nations is far less diverse than we have on this list I promised this would be brief (ish) so I'll stop there Cheers, Lachlan [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
