Jeffrey Jaffe named W3C CEO

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today named Jeffrey Jaffe ?76, SM ?77, PhD ?79 its new chief executive officer. Jaffe brings to the role extensive global leadership experience in the information technology industry, including as president of Bell Labs Research and Advanced Technologies at Lucent Technologies; as vice president of technology for IBM; and most recently as executive vice president, products, and chief technology officer at Novell. In these positions he combined business leadership and vision with technical expertise, and demonstrated strong support for open standards and open source. "Web technologies continue to be the vehicle for every industry to incorporate the rapid pace of change into their way of doing business," said Jaffe. "I'm excited to join W3C at this time of increased innovation, since W3C is the place where the industry comes together to set standards for the Web in an open and collaborative fashion." As W3C CEO, Jaffe will work with Director Tim Berners-Lee, staff, membership, and the public to evolve and communicate W3C's organizational vision. The CEO is responsible for W3C's global operations, for maintaining the interests of all of the W3C?s stakeholders, and for sustaining a culture of cooperation and transparency, so that W3C continues to be the leading forum for the technical development and stewardship of the Web. W3C's initiatives ? including HTML 5 and other Web Applications technology, Semantic Web, Mobile Web, Accessibility, and Internationalization ? are all designed to make the web a powerful tool for commerce, collaboration, and creativity.