Jeff Jaffe now W3C CEO - Update

Ex-Novell CTO, Jeff Jaffe, is now CEO of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, and will be working with Tim Berners-Lee. Jaffe will take on the role of operations management at the 65 person organisation as CEO, a position which has been open since June 2009, when the previous CEO, Steve Bratt, left to become CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. The move will allow Berners-Lee to focus on the technical issues that surround developing and managing web standard such as HTML5.

Jaffe told US media that "Something I intend to put a lot of energy into is having an extremely open and active dialogue with all the stakeholders of W3C. W3C will have better engagement with the development community". One element of the consortium Jaffe will probably want to work on is the W3C web site, which at the time of writing, was still prominently advertising the post of CEO on its front page.

Jaffe has previously spent twenty years at IBM, eventually becoming corporate vice president of technology, five years at Lucent as Bell Labs president of research and advanced technology and, most recently, four years as CTO of Novell, a post he left in January. The W3C is jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics and Keio University in Japan and has over 350 member organisations around the world.

Update - Jaffe, known for his blogging, has now posted his first entry on the W3C blog saying "I am honored to be here, I am honored to work with Tim Berners-Lee, and excited to play a role in this mission". Jaffe explained that his immediate priority is "to preserve and enhance the W3C culture of having an open consensus-based process". As part of that process, as CEO of the W3C, he plans to blog more frequently ; "I intend to post often and invite comments. This will be a good way for people to engage in public discussion with me on issues of importance to the organization".

(djwm)