This document is just a proposal from its author. Describing it as anything more established than just one person's idea is deceptive.

Foundations

The scope of the web covers all of humankind and its nature is massive, complex, and evolving. As a result, a simple declaration of high-level ideas is insufficient to guide its development. The W3C is not legitimate for distilling a small set of values that are universally relevant to all of humankind in its glorious diversity. We are, however, legitimate in convening the broadest possible web community, in supporting it through the in-depth discussion of complex technical details and their consequences, and in helping groups turn these discussions into decisions that can be implemented and that represent the best consensus of the community.

Building on top of this very specific legitimacy, our values and vision are embedded directly in how we work such that:

• They are implementable in the sense that they can be directly and productively applied to the review of all web standards. In the same way that a feature in a standard that is not testable is just words in the wind, values that do not support the evaluation of standards as they are produced are just cheap declarations. Our values walk the talk: they are described in detailed documents, and those documents are used in the process of horizontal review which all web standards must pass through. Our horizontal review documents drive towards the vision of a better web and enforce consistent, concrete, and detailed values across the board.
• They are produced and owned by the web community. There is no select group tasked with framing a constitution for the web. Instead, the community openly gathers in open groups to contribute to the evolution of this or that aspect of our values and vision. The power to evolve the W3C's values and vision is pushed to the edges and delegated to those who take part in the relevant debates as much as possible. The rare exception is this document, which is produced jointly by all of the W3C's different governance bodies, written specifically to be as short and limited as possible, and is ratified by the entire W3C Membership.
• They are not static but rather are living values, in constant evolution. Neither the web nor the world are stable, static places and our understanding of digital technology is still evolving faster than most can keep up with. A static document, or one that only evolves every few years, would fall behind quickly. But because we have distributed the work and pushed the power to evolve our values to the community, we are collectively constantly iterating on our values and vision to refine and improve them.

A different way to understand our approach to values and vision is the notion of "rules in use." In institutional analysis ([[IAD]]) it is common to distinguish the rules that people say they have (eg. on paper) from those that are actually applied in practice. Only the latter are relevant. The manner is which we approach our values and vision is geared towards ensuring that we only have rules in use. Nothing is a value that isn't enforced in horizontal review, and then only if it is shown to apply across different standards. We would be poorly served by a set of principles that are too lofty, too abstract, or that require too much conceptual engineering to apply. This document is built on a simple tenet: the W3C's vision and principles should be held to the same criteria as its standards.

This approach works better for a project as complex and ambitious as the web meant for a world as richly diverse as ours. Because our values are detailed, they are less subject to imagined agreement and easier for newcomers to grasp. Because they are concrete and have consequences in terms of what standards can ship, the entire community has skin in the game because they cannot be ignored. Because they are subject to extensive debate and consensus, they are the best that a community can produce.

More precisely, our values and vision are grounded in three elementary principles:

User Agency

The web is an application of the Internet, and the Internet is for end users ([[RFC8890]]). The web shifts power toward people and increases "what each person is able to do and to be" ([[Creating-Capabilities]]) not only individually but also through collective structures. All of our work is rooted in the capabilities of user agency.

Subsidiarity

Within the W3C, central authority should only perform tasks which cannot be performed better at a more local level. When it comes to our visions and values, very little is defined here from the top and most of the work is delegated to specific communities that have a better understanding of the specific area on which they work.

Implementability

We do not claim to have any specific value or a vision unless we can show that it can be described in detail through a consensus process of decision-making, and can then serve to support the concrete review of real-world web standards. We expect our standards to be testable, implementable, and useful in real-world usage, and we do not relax those expectations for our values. If this means that our set of values may be incomplete because we have yet to work out some of them in sufficient concrete detail, then that it just the work we need to be doing.

To summarize, our principles are embodied in what we do and don't consider desirable in a web standard. They are not abstract ideals but rather concrete goals and constraints that are implemented in the standards we set. The beating heart of our principles is the horizontal review system. We reject the notion that a small centralized group could be granted the power to decide which principles support standards that belong to the whole web community. Instead, we rely on subsidiarity and delegate the responsibility for concrete principles to specific horizontal review groups.

What we expect from horizontal review groups is that they develop concrete principles for their area and the expertise to apply these principles across the whole of the web's technical stack, in collaboration with their community. The web should be shaped by the cooperation of diverse voices with different life stories and deep but varied expertise. Horizontal review groups are a direct and workable implementation of this view. The only task that needs to be performed by a more central authority is that of organizing this cooperation.

Change

Both the world and the web are changing, and our understanding of them is in constant evolution. As a result, we need to be able to evolve and refine our values and vision over time. We consider two cases in which change is necessary.

Change to existing values

In case change is needed to existing values, that work must be carried out in the relevant group tasked with maintaining and enforcing them.

Adding new values

If there is an area that is not covered by existing values and vision documents, then a new one needs to be added. In order to establish one such new area, the proponent needs to write it up in sufficient detail, to assemble a group behind it that demonstrates rough consensus in the community at the very least that the area is worth supporting and that consensus is possible, and show that there is sufficient support to sustain an ongoing horizontal review group with sufficient bandwidth to process all the documents which it will need to review. This presents a high bar, but we are better off with fewer values which we live by than more that are just words on paper. Note that such a new area does not need to be deeply technical; it could for instance apply to the processes by which we work or that are deployed by our standards (eg. a good potential candidate would be transparency, which we assume but have no concrete consensus on).

Values & Vision

For each area, we list the area and how it is deployed in practice. Much of this information is extracted from How to get horizontal review.