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. As more people connect to the web using a wider variety of devices, and as the world increases its reliance on the Internet ecosystem, W3C is poised to enter a new phase of organizational evolution.

"Jeff has outstanding leadership and business skills to help address a wealth of arising opportunities," said Tim Berners-Lee. "Just as the web is constantly growing and changing, so is the community around it and so is the Consortium. Jeff's broad experience gives him a deep understanding of many different types of organizations, which will be invaluable in managing W3C's evolution."

Jaffe plans to blog regularly on the W3C CEO Blog, beginning with his first post on reflections of a new W3C CEO. More about Jaffe is available on his home page.

About the World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. W3C primarily pursues its mission through the creation of Web standards and guidelines designed to ensure long-term growth for the Web. More than 350 organizations are members of the Consortium. W3C is jointly run by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM in France, and Keio University in Japan, and has additional offices worldwide). For more information see http://www.w3.org/.