Funder dashboard for W3C specs
Live: https://tarakiyee.github.io/funder-dashboard-w3c/
Public funders are asked to support standards work but have no view of where money or people would help. This dashboard gives them one: enter a W3C spec shortname and get a card of facts about its time in process, editors, horizontal review and maintenance, each paired with what the funder guide draft says about supporting it.
Why
Public funders are increasingly asked to support open standards work, but a spec gives few cues about where money or people would actually make a difference. This dashboard applies the lens of the Internet-Draft Evaluating Technical Standards in the Public Interest: A Guide for Public Funding Organizations to live data about one spec at a time.
It is an assessment of the funding opportunity around a spec, not of the spec itself. Each card pairs a fact with the question a funder could act on:
- Time in process. Maturity and years since first draft. Standards take years; support has to outlast a single grant.
- Editors. Who edits the latest version and where they work. More perspectives strengthen a spec; could you fund someone to join?
- Review. Which horizontal review requests exist: accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security, TAG. Review needs reviewers; a gap may be something support could fill, or the review may have happened elsewhere.
- Maintenance. Recent commits and open issues in the spec repository. Open issues are entry points for funded contributors.
Facts are shown as they are, with no scores or ratings.
Data
Live, from the browser: the W3C API, the browser-specs index (its web-specs package on jsDelivr), and the GitHub API. Links out to webstatus.dev for implementations and to the working group's IPR page for patents.
Related work
- W3C spec-dashboard tracks publication status, implementations and issue history per working group, for chairs and the W3C team. Same sources, organised for the people running specs rather than for funders.
- W3C horizontal review tracker lists open review comments for reviewers and editors. The Review section here shows the request side of that process, as a cue for where reviewer time could be funded.
- OpenSSF Scorecard scores repositories on security practices. This dashboard deliberately does not score.
- ecosyste.ms Funds and CHAOSS bring health metrics and funding allocation to open-source packages. This applies the same intent to standards; the Editors section is CHAOSS's organizational diversity metric applied to one spec.
As far as we know, no existing tool maps a funder's own criteria onto standards documents, or puts who edits a spec and who pays them on one card.
Built in the 90-minute window at the W3C TPAC 2026 hackathon in Dublin, 26 October 2026, for the "Visualize standards data" challenge.
