Rwy'n bryda'r edrych, Andrew. Fe wnaeth sefydlu cymrydau. Mae ydw lŵn yn ychydig o'r sgwrdd geisig, o hynny dipynen ymlaes, ac mae'r ddweud bod oed yn fforddau i bwysig. Rydyn ni'n ddweud o'r cymrydol. Dwi'n ddweud o nos i'r cymrydol o'r rhaglenau. Fe wnaeth bod gennym ni'n ddweud. Mae wedyn i fy ffnol i'r ysgol. Ac a ddim yn y rhaid i'r rhaglenu. Ysgol Diolch Andrew Spuyn. anglyst y Microsoft. Yn genny Tenorzen, yw'r CTO at the Open Data Institute. To my left we have Scott Jensen, who does user experience at Google. And who's next? Oh, it's Tomnen over there. Tom Ashworth is front-end developer over at Twitter. And Alex on the end there does user experience stuff for the government digital service. I think we are, so sorry. ac yn gyfnodd yn ganweithio. Rwy'n pob dduodol yn rhoi heb gynhyrchu iawn. Rwy'n chymell bod yn cyfre Temple mewn ddweud, rwy'n meddwl â'r gwybodaeth. Rwy'n dod am y cael ei ddechrau yn ei meddwl yma yma. Ond roedden ni'n ei ddechrau cymryd i ddechrau i ddechrau'r ffordd. Rwy'n dod dim bod yn rhoi y ffordd. Mae every opinion is valid. Well, nearly every opinion. I'm trying hard to let go of that reference to being older than make. What do you think? Actually is Gareth here, is he still here? The guy who said that. Yn oedd, mae oedda chi, ond yn ym 37, gydwysim i'n gallu ddweud o'n ddweud o'r gwell. Mae'n mynd i'n gwneud o'i gwirio gwahodd yma o'r antychrytio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio sy'n mynd i'r ymgyrchir yw y bwysig a'r rhaglen sy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. The other thing I want to say in this rather lengthy preamble before I introduced you, Jenny, is that you've heard people say when they've been asked their questions, oh, this isn't what I wrote, I'm expecting that quite a few people who I call on will say, I have no idea what this even means. It bears no relation whatsoever to what I wrote down. We did actually try to keep it thematically coherent, so the people who are asking the questions may have some words in Dan's nodding there. There are some words in your question, Dan, that you did originally write. Not next to each other and not in the same order. Right, so Jenny, Jenny, can you please tell us where next? Can I have my slides up, please? It's on the screen here, it's just not on the screen there. Oh, do you need to? Oh, yeah, it's not plugged in. Right, sorry for that slight delay. The topic of future web is a rather broad one. The future being very much longer than the past, hopefully. What have I done there, touch word, right. So thinking about the future web, obviously the first person to ask about where the web might go would be. This is not good, okay. I think I might need to use it. This is using reveal.js, by the way. Thank you. We do need a future faster. Sorry about this, Eric, use alternative. What did you do to my computer? We are living in the future. Excellent, that looks much better. Oh, it's not up on the screen. It looks better. Right, thank you. So let's ask Timbal. Now, of course, thinking about asking Timbal what the future of the web holds, of course he asked me anything on Reddit, where he was asked what was one of the things that you never anticipated about the internet and famously replied, kittens. So in terms of predicting what's going to happen in the future web, I can predict that there will still be kittens on the web emphases two. I want to focus on three themes, three trends that I think are going to be important as we go forward, as web developers, and look at those in terms of what that means for us when we're developing web applications. Those three themes are going to be more sensitivity around our personal information, more data being available, and as we've touched on many times today, more devices. So, more sensitivity, first of all. Ed Snowden. One of the things that has happened recently that has changed the way in which we think about the web is the revelations around that Ed Snowden came about what the NSA is looking at, what GCHQ is looking at, and I found this on Wikipedia, a fantastic little diagram. SSL added and removed here. This is the stuff that we can get into guys at the back end of Google where there's no encryption and we have free reign. What does this mean in terms of how we design our systems, our web applications? What does it mean in terms of these revelations, this thinking about where our private information is going? What does that mean for us? Well, there's loads of policy implications, loads of things that we can think of at a legislative level or a policy level, but there are also some technical ones. I'm on the technical architecture group at the W3C and one of the things that has come up several times without any kind of resolution or in-depth thinking is what we do around permissions on the web where how do we balance the need for you to know that you are being looked at through your video camera on your laptop with it not being right so much in your face that you cannot interact with whatever the application is. How do we balance up the need to request on a case-by-case basis information about your location with the irritation of being requested on a case-by-case basis about your location? How do we get around these terrible kinds of permission interfaces that everybody just clicks through and ignores everybody being everybody and doesn't wear a tinfoil hat that is? So that's one set of kind of questions. How do we handle those permissions when we have lots of ways of tracking us? Another area that I wanted to raise was how do we move away from these centralized services that are so vulnerable to a single point of failure, if you like, in our private data? So I'm particularly interested in a couple of activities that are going on around this, around unhosted web apps, the idea of having a web application over here that operates on data over here and you can control how your data gets accessed by that web app. It doesn't actually hold all your data itself. And also the work of re-decentralize, which explores a lot of these issues and I'd encourage you to have a look at. How do we get to a web that isn't as centralized as it currently is? Because of these sensitivities that we have about our personal data being collected in huge databases which are vulnerable to attack. So that was my first area. Second area is about data. Now, so far during the day, the focus has really been on what happens within a browser context. Where I work at the Open Data Institute, all I hear about is data. All I hear about is smart cities and the data that you can get from devices and sensors within a road network in smart cities. This is smart city logo land, right? We talk about home automation and the extra information we can get about our homes, interactions with home systems, sensors, more data coming in from our home systems. We talk about quantified self, wearable computing that monitors us constantly, that provides streams and streams of data. We talk about open data naturally at the Open Data Institute. More government data being made available. Also from companies, data being made available that we can all use. We talk about big data. Masses amounts of fast moving variable data. I love the way that in my search for big data, you see that McDonald's site? Why? I don't know, anyway. Data, so we talk about medical data, defence data, Dicca data, whatever that is. Morning data, noon data, afternoon data, the night data, everything is data. What does this mean for the web when we have so much more data being passed around? There's so much more streaming data, so much more big data. HTTP as a protocol is not good for this kind of streaming. It's not good for these kinds of big files. So what other protocols are we using? What other protocols do we need? And how do we make them play nicely with the web? How do we make them play well with HTML pages and HTTP? The web was made for documents. So is Jason the pinnacle of data on the web? Is Jason really all that we need for expressing data on the web? I don't think so. The other question I'd like to raise is, what does a native data browser look like? What happens currently when you have data that's made available on the web is that you have to create your own kind of component, your own kind of visualisation. We have things like this which are data tables, JavaScript plug-in that makes everything, that streams data in, that makes it sortable, filterable, pageable, and so on. But what about moving to more integrated data and documents using the kinds of technologies within D3? What does this mean for us on the web? What kinds of components, what kinds of web components could we build that natively work with data? Those are the kinds of questions that I think are interesting for the future. Third area, more devices. This is the area that we've touched on loads today. So we have a browser that's stopped working. Again, more devices. Give me, come on. Okay, so we have more devices that don't work. That is completely interactive. Okay, more devices. Yes, that's a Windows tablet. TVs, watches, fridges, cars. All of these devices have differences in their size, in their resolution, in their connectivity, in their processing power, in their modes of interaction as we've already talked about, and in their context of use, huge variety, massive variety, of ways in which we as humans will interact with the web. Of course that means that we need this responsive design plus plus, not only responsive layout, but responsive images, responsive interactions, changing based on the devices that we use, responsive stories, different ways of storing the information and knowing whether you're going to go on and offline intermittently or whether you're going to have a constant internet connection. For example, we'll change the way in which we design our web applications. Right, and a final thought. We're currently dominated by four particular web browsers and fewer rendering engines. Well, okay. Perhaps we should be dominated by one more. It's bling, it's the same. My closing question would be, are we agile enough? Have we got enough small pieces loosely joined to enable us to adjust to a changing future? Can the web that we know be disrupted by the next best thing, something that is too big to be taken down? Thank you. Thank you very much, Jenny. I anticipate a future in which Jenny will give her presentation using web technology with fewer than three different browsers. But I don't expect it will come soon. Right. Jenny, thank you, that was great. Hopefully we can follow up on some of your themes through some of the questions that we have put through the ringer. For the final time today, at least in this role, I'm going to call on Andrew Betts. This time to read a question that he had nothing to do with. That is very true, actually, and I have no more questions, I promise you. What is the role of the web in the world of wearables with no screen? Okay, so the question is, what is the role of the web in a world with wearables with no screen? The fact of the web is primarily a visual thing in its output, at least. We've talked about different input modalities. What about different output modalities? Jenny, do you want to kick us off on this one? Just recovering. Jenny, calm down. It's one of my bug bears that we focus on browsers, we focus on screens, and we don't think about the other ways in which all sorts of agents might interact on the web. I think wearables is just one example of this, but there are lots of other kinds of agents that we need to be thinking about and understand that they live on the web, too, and they consume web content, too. So, wearables, you've got a difference in input modality, but you've also got a difference in output modality, which I think changes the way in which we need to think about how we design our pages in the same way as we've talked about accessibility issues in the last session. Sorry, that wasn't very... No, that's great. Thank you. Alice, I know that you've done a lot of work on the internet of things. How does this strike you in that context? Well, I mean, I think it's... I think the web is going to continue in the way it currently does in a world without screens, because, as Jenny said, there are already plenty of things that don't have screens, and there'll be new things that don't have screens, and some of those will be objects that we currently understand, like watches, that have a sort of additional... ...innovated by having the web put into them, but then there might be some completely new, invented things that are a middle ground that you would never have thought about before you were able to put the web into sort of stuff, and there are, you know, like... I used to work for Berg, and so we made Little Printer, and Little Printer is... We made a mistake by calling it Little Printer, because it's not... Well, it is a printer, but that's not like its primary function, and you would never really want that of Little Printer without the internet, and in that way it's sort of a new product rather than, like, an internet fridge or something like that. But Little Printer doesn't have a screen unless you count the receipt paper that it prints on as a screen, which, you know, we... we mischievously say it is sometimes. Thanks for that. Go ahead, Scott. I can just poke fun at the community a little bit, though, because right now I don't think that this... that the web community even can get its head wrapped around the web without a watch, let alone a web, but not on a screen at all. There's this... I think the web has never recovered from the fact that screens started getting smaller. It's bigger. No, no, they continually got bigger, and it basically just immediately just didn't worry about things, and then when it reversed direction, we collectively lost our minds, and we still haven't recovered from that. And so this idea that we have to have one size fits all works great as long as you're willing to scroll everything 20 pages. But if you want to have... I hate to get into the web app versus web page thing, because it's a waste of, you know, but the fact is that we are trying to make things that are more interactive, and the web has not got its head wrapped around that quite yet. And so I do think we have a lot of soul searching to do to figure out what interaction means on multiple devices. Okay. So to summarise some of the points here, what we're saying is, we haven't even got to grips with what we've got, but I would come back and say, hey, but you haven't seen anything yet, so we better hurry up and make up our minds about what we're going to do. I can see Remy on the queue. Let me take Remy and come back to you. Yes, this is kind of linked to the question I had before, but I mean, you mentioned kind of poking the web. I mean, I don't get it, right? I don't get how my phone is of the web. It could, it can, I think, talk over TCPIP, and it can talk to a web server, but in a proprietary format, it's not... there's no webbiness that I can see there. There's no way of me getting into it. Right. I'm going to cut you off there, because we're going to come back to this as a topic later, so I'll let you back in. Fascinating where your point was. We will be coming back to it. Does it qualify as a web device? It's not purely syntactic argument, I don't think. Tom. I think we as a web community have good things to say to the people who are building these wearable devices. We're going to put our technology stack on them, so you're not going to find a headless web browser running on a Fitbit, but we can say if you make url-able resources available and connected to each other. We know that's a good thing. We can point out to the people who are building these things that that has some really positive benefits. And if we give things URLs and we make them addressable and we make them accessible, even if it's JSON and not HTML, but we use the principles of the web and to some extent the internet, then I think we can have a really positive impact as the web community on whatever comes over the next few years in terms of wearable devices and things that don't have screens. Okay, Andrew. I think to call inherent to the web is the presentation format, that presentation there, so to think the web without a screen is a little bit weird. That's good. You yourself were talking about music and notation and so on. What's wrong with a web of music? Nothing's wrong with a web of music, but I think we've got all of this data in a particular format that we can access and we can use web languages in order to talk to data and in order to talk to devices, but I don't see it as the web on those devices. Jenny, go on. So the reason that I disagree is that for me then the web is that the main definition of the web is use of HTTP. It isn't the use of HTML and if you count the use of HTTP, you can be sending data over HTTP which needn't be shown on a screen which could be interacted with with a wearable device or in any other kind of way. If we tie the web as only being HTML I think we make a mistake. I'm not getting into the protocols but what the web is is to me it has a presentation and it's something very visual. But we can certainly use the content and we can use the languages that we've got in order to interact with devices. But maybe we're getting crossed. Right, okay. I think we could continue on this and I'm very sorry to everybody who's on the queue here, but we are going to move on to the next topic now because we've got too much to cover, we just have. I am going to call again possibly for the final time today Christopher, you've been an active participant I hope I didn't mangle your question beyond your ability to read it. Yes, if you don't mean to just preface the reason I'm kind of asking these questions I've actually recently had experience with this but also when we talk about the future we focus a little bit too much on the tech side so basically my question is the future of the web will see rising importance in optimizing sites for the use in China and working within National Firewall many popular and available services such as YouTube are blocked over that. How do we accommodate different nationalities to privacy, sensitive content and inappropriate content and so on? And there's also the technological barriers to people in there as well. Jenny, I'm going to ask you to leap in here again because this is I think directly came off one of your principal points. So because nobody else wanted to touch it with a barge card. On the internet then the typical way in which we move around those barriers is that we subvert them. That tends to be what happens. We tend to work around those kinds of issues and I don't have direct experience of the issues in China and I can't really speak to them. It's about how we internationally come up with some kind of understanding about how when we have lots of different laws around privacy, around data protection and so on how we internationally handle that is a very interesting question. I've seen people from Africa talk about wanting to have legislation in their countries that explicitly precludes anybody looking at data within servers in their countries to make them a more attractive option for people who are building web applications to use servers in their country, for example. So we might start to see an arms race between different nationalities as they try to provide a more interesting web environment for people to use maybe. The other kinds of things that I think are interesting think about what Tim Ball said at the 25th anniversary of the web just the other week talking about a bill of rights for internet users whether we should have a right to use the internet whether we should have a right to use it with particular levels of understanding about what our privacy should be what access we should have to content on the web or the other kind of idea that I've heard floating around is whether we should have a Geneva convention type of thing where we know that there are going to be states that block us from accessing certain kinds of content but should we have an international understanding about the limits of that blocking that we internationally agree on. I think these are all really interesting questions and I think that we're only at the beginning of starting to have those conversations particularly with policy makers who really don't understand any of this at all. That's quite scary. I think we also have to look at this question from another point of view which is, actually this is a moot point if the web is not viable in any particular country. So for example in I won't call them developing nations because their economies are bigger than the UK's but in countries like Brazil or say China or India we have to ask is the web actually a viable platform there at the moment if I for example work for a social network and let's say I work for Facebook and I want to I want to I want to get more users in a country like one of the ones I just mentioned I've got a range of technologies that are available to me and honestly as web people we have to say the web does not win in that battle it does win in that battle low powered Android wins that battle and and I'll give you I'll give you Firefox but you have to admit that I think for a big company if you're going to invest in a technology right now low powered Android phones particularly if you're heading into those markets are a very good option we are missing certain key elements of the technology stack that will enable us to make gains in those places there are quite a few questions in the moderator actually about I'm going to cut you off there because I think that you've done your advertising spiel thank you very much can we go to Robert Daley who's on the queue oh yeah we currently think of one device one user but with car OSs and basic giant touch screens that will have multiple users using the same app at the same time how do we deal with say a driver and a passenger using the same app in a car at the same time about switching user accounts or how do we deal with multiple people interacting with the web or indeed on one device multiple people on single people on multiple devices I actually would add that I feel like that's exactly the issue the web has right now is that we've been so enamored with on one device on one screen that's just our entire myopia I can go even further that that one screen has to by the way look and feel as much like an iPhone as possible I mean a little editorial at that point but I do think that the web needs to be exploring these kinds of things so what would it mean to have something on my watch which then entices me to pull out my phone and allows me then to continue the experience I don't think we're considering that and it's something that frankly I think the web is most powerful at playing with okay sorry I'm going to have to skip to Guy and then we'll move on to the next topic I just want to kind of get back to the country question and say that I don't think it's for a gun conclusion that the web needs to adapt to those countries I think to a large extent the countries need to adapt to the web and it's sort of a force to be reckoned with and you know Twitter and other platforms have already demonstrated that multiple times over the past few years I think you know when you talk about the future of the web it's very much possible that the future of the web is the openness of it and it's kind of the government's problem to sort of figure out how do they navigate within that world so the intent is about getting data from one place to the other privacy concerns around that etc yeah I agree with that I'm really sorry about that we were actually going to go light on a lot of time for that but we've run out of time on it despite thinking we were not going to spend as much on it as we might be on oh well right next topic Daniel Applequist because I'm much nicer than Christian Heilman I'm going to give you your question ok oh this isn't what I wrote so in its march towards increasing sophistication and I think this question parenthetically this question kind of goes back to the more display browser oriented web that we've been talking about for it's not to discount the importance of the of the data oriented web which I think is also important but in its march towards increasing sophistication is the web losing touch with being easy to learn and therefore accessible to a very broad authorship community and I'm going to add one more parenthetical statement I think this relates to the whole meme that's going on right now about teaching kids to code and getting kids and especially young people engaged in development how do we get them engaged in the web easily ok, thank you Dan I'm going to re-paraphrase your question back to another fork of the question that you like which is it used to be terribly easy to write a basic web page it was pretty shit but it was very easy to do that was an on-ramp that point has been made earlier today but in order to be competitive or to provide a better user experience things have got a lot more complicated have they got disproportionately complicated in order to achieve the objectives of being more sophisticated no yeah right we can do this no no no no back in the day it was still quite hard to get a web page onto a server and not a lot of people are interested in doing it proportionately because it was quite a lot of effort because there wasn't this sort of corpus like help and tutorials and stuff and now you can do you can get very very far and do very cool stuff without knowing basically anything and like that may or not may be a good thing or a bad thing but like it's not to say that we've made it too complicated for people is really doing people a massive disservice these people that are like oh I can't be bothered they always existed and they're still around and they still can't be bothered and then there are people who can be bothered and are still being served by what we have and you can just go further and the people who will say oh but it's possible for people to make like terrible mistakes and do really dangerous things that's fine, those people are going to learn really quickly how to be better and that's brilliant too so this kind of like yeah they'll learn really quickly but possibly with disastrous consequences you know I use this analogy which is putting a chainsaw in the hands of a 6 year old either they learn or well you know they don't I teach people every week mostly beginners in fact people who live in London code bar, IO, minority people in tech we're trying to promote particularly women so if you've got free time on Wednesdays please come to that but I teach people every Wednesday and I see this a lot I see people who are coming new to HTML and new to CSS and absolutely it is possible for them to go from zero and in an hour and a half have a huge mile on their face because they've just created their first website there's absolutely no reason to believe that that's fading away and also when you started programming and doing things initially I mean in CSS you say you actually made a thing of that and when you wanted to do anything dynamic did you see the first script that executed in HTML are you sure that we can do anything more dangerous than that? I think we're talking about that Valid Andrew I think as with as any technology matures that there are some things that we used to do that were quite difficult to do we try and simplify those if I think back when I started the web just trying to get someone to just trying to get data into a form and save that onto a server somewhere that was actually quite a complicated task it took us a long time to do that it was a very expensive thing to do there's a lot of simple tools out there that allow people to do that quite easily now and so whilst that's an easy thing to do I think it means that some people don't understand what it is that they're actually what's actually going on in the background but then do you need to know what's going on in the background? I look at the microphone I just want to add to that a little bit and say I just recently started doing code club so I teach kids as young as 5 How are you getting on? No sorry One day I hope to make a career out of this but I teach I teach kids as young as like 5 or 6 how to do programming and the speed, the facility with which they pick up sophisticated concepts is incredible and I think with the low barrier to entry that the web provides I don't think we're in any danger of making that too complex I think Linda has just arrived from code club as we were speaking about it without wishing to put words in her maths about what the mission of code club is I mean it really fills a gap in education that does exist and there is a problem with that and so when you're talking about maybe you're talking about doing coming to the web as like a teenager who is looking to make their first web page and then there's code club who is sort of enabling kids at a much younger age to get involved with technology and think about and programming in a way that just the education system is going to be and since we're talking about the future of the web really groups like code club and young reward state are making the future of the web which is the people who make the web so we should invest in those and push on here because I think we probably only got time for two more things if we're going to stick to our timing so Daniel no danger that moving on from eds eds eds eds no yes this was a combination of yours and someone else's just to check it starts is the web no given this to ask on behalf of eds sodin or salvin but I think it's the question that Remi perhaps wanted to ask that is exactly bubbling under a few of the conversations as well it goes like this is the web going to grow into an all encompassing platform for future computing is there any area which will be spared or by contrast is the future of the web just providing APIs for native applications to be built thank you so this is a question about what are the limits of the web what is the definition of the word web I don't think we probably want to go that way but you guys started having a little bit of hammer and tongs about that earlier would you like to continue that with the basics of this question so will the web grant an all encompassing computation platform Jenny you say no because some things that are inherently web like like HTTP are not suitable so I think the basic how I would define the web which would be about the use of HTTP and the use of resources identified by URLs takes us a long way so there are some aspects of particularly data flows on the internet that don't use web protocols and should not use web protocols and we need to be thinking outside of the HTTP as the only protocol that we ever use on the internet Andrew so this is also about languages and how we can extend languages to other you can make it platforms I see the web we've invested so much time in it we've invested so much time putting the content into a format that we can access and we can do so much more with languages like JavaScript nowadays that they're actually starting to stand up to other languages so the web can exist in almost anything if I think about some of the development work I do at the moment using JavaScript to access the same APIs that I can do through C++ or I could do through C sharp when creating applications for Windows 8 for instance I'm using the same web technologies and languages so are you saying that the distinction is a bogus distinction in some ways you're saying everything flows into everything else I think it can exist in places where we don't have it currently Remi I'm hoping this was adjacent to the point that you were making absolutely nothing to do with it I don't think the web will be everything and I don't think it will just be with the eyes so I think to agree with what you're saying I think there's a lot of like there's a lot of hype around the internet of things there's a lot of hype around smartwatches and all that stuff and I think there are a lot of companies that are doing a lot of figuring out through doing at the moment and what we'll find in 10 years no not 10 years, 5 years is that the web will be in some stuff and it will make a lot of sense and everybody will be like check out my cool web enabled thing and then it won't be another stuff and people will be like remember when we tried to put the internet in the fucking fridges that was madness and like but there's a lot of hype and a lot of marketing stuff that makes all of this seem like like people are seriously thinking about this when actually they're just figuring stuff out and you know some of it is a fact I seriously challenged that in the sense I'd go back to the audience in a second in the sense that I'm old enough to have said 15 years ago do you know what people are going to be using these devices here to do all kinds of cool stuff on the move and people said yeah yeah yeah we'll wait to see that so I think that expressing the skepticism about the direction that these technologies will take is a potentially dangerous route to take oh well let's not have any skepticism there oh well let's not have any skepticism there so that wasn't quite the top I write JavaScript all day every day and quite frankly I do not want JavaScript on a pacemaker I do not want I just like if you said to me look here's a web enabled thing that's going in your body I'm going to tell you what go ahead we actually have there's actually examples of what we tried to do once when there was Nokia series 40 thing we tried to do an interpreter for doing things running on a device that basically you couldn't even fit a JavaScript interpreter on because I don't know if you remember but JavaScript apart from having obvious limitations regarding how we handle numbers etc requires quite a bit of stack etc and we ended up doing the first gadget engine thing that we built in this company in a scheme in a scheme because it was a smaller interpreter that could fit in like approximately 4K right so there would be things as we were saying that basically you cannot use the HTML CSS for actually making your interface simpler and you cannot use JavaScript to kind of reuse what you have been doing because literally there's no space so not only because of the whole asynchronous thing but because technically some of these things in the Internet of Things are not even going to have stack to run JavaScript on not to use HTTP for that matter Christian you had a word you wanted to interject and then we're going to probably have to move on one thing is we talk about HTTP but then we're actually using a system here that uses WebSockets and we're using a system that uses WebRTC and has peer-to-peer connections that are encrypted between two computers so that companies starting with N and ending with SA couldn't actually listen to us I find it also interesting that we when I started on the web what I loved most about it is that I can use whatever I want to actually start connecting with it and now we're talking about smartwatches glasses that cost $1,500 basically toys for the western world to beat in the future of the web and to me the future of the web lies in as you said emerging markets with more people than we have and fixing that to gadgets that are closed in one environment is to me the wrong way of making the future of the web Okay, a closing comment from the panel here, Scott have you got something to say on this? Well I'm intrigued with how we want this future to go because there's clearly a discussion about how the standards bodies work but I would argue that the vast majority of the conversations that I tend to have with people is all about well how can you make this web page scroll on a small screen and so I think to a certain extent we've trapped ourselves in our own paradigm which is that these are just scrolling web pages and I think that there's so much more the web can do and for example the previous question about multi-displays I don't want to aspire to be with the iPhone was five years ago and I think the web can do so much more than that Isn't it a big issue that we still say it should look the same everywhere? That's what I always have to fight This is a little off topic guys I don't agree with that but yeah It's my job I quite enjoyed actually Right, we have a final question which is going to set us I think down the path actually that you are on just now Scott so we'll let you continue on that one from Andre Barrens Hi this is Andre's question Web developers and even corporations that are outside the browser vendor community have the feeling of being a prisoner to decisions others make with often limited means to address certain problems who should be determining the future of the web and how So who should be determining the future of the web and how Well I assume this is the whole extensible web manifesto discussion It can be I still feel that our biggest issue is our own myopia of what we think is important because the vast majority of this community is just trying to figure out and argue about apps versus native I would like the web community to start to figure out a way to experiment with these new things How would I write a web app to work across multiple displays I'd have to roll everything from scratch and I just don't think that we're talking about ways to encourage that kind of experimentation It seems to be so standards driven now that we've lost the ability to do stupid shit and I'd like to do more of it You carry on doing more stupid shit I'll talk to someone else Jenny, the view expressed here is that people don't have a sufficient voice in the process So I think the web is what we what we build it's what we make it's through experimentation and that we have a responsibility if we want our voice to be heard to step up and shout So I think that in terms of standardisation I think the W3C has done a lot to try and open up discussion who are adding community groups for example over the past three years but I do think that there is a massive gap between developers that are in this room here and the majority of web developers out there who probably do feel that they have no role in the conversation Can I just ask for a little straw poll here out of everybody in this room here who has actually, or who does participate in particularly the W3C process Okay So who... Specifically W3C I think since we're talking about the web and I guess I'm making the web and W3C a kind of what it needn't be so is the W3C the future guardian where, well that's another question I guess someone could ask it What I think is the view that is expressed here is that that's not working particularly well I think everybody in this room everybody who contacts a browser vendor and asks them to fix a bug, asks them to add a feature you've all got a voice in this they're all listening I can't remember the exact numbers X thousand of bugs reported to the internet explorer team and there's a team of hundreds of people sitting there listening to those implementing those changes so if you're sending your requests in there's people listening to it and ultimately I think everyone in this room has a chance to input into where it goes I would ask if you've had experience of that because just to some examples there was a bug in Firefox from about 2002-2003 to do with fragment identifiers in iframes it was opened in 2003 I bumped it a year and a half ago somebody else had bumped it about three years before that no nothing from Mozilla in terms of internet explorer I don't know who to talk to I don't know how I can get at those people Apple we all know the story there and for example when the developer tooling guys were up and people who were working on these things when asked how do we contribute kind of shrunk up and I just don't think it's true that these are friendly environments connect.microsoft.com where you can submit your requests and there's people, there's paid Microsoft employees who will then respond to you and say this isn't a feature we're interested in implementing and you'll get a response from a human being through that and there's loads of people in there let's go to the audience on this and then hang on a second but let's get to the back first I'm kind of biased on this but I think that out of the four rendering engines that we saw at the beginning three of them are open source so basically people can either work on the engines themselves or find someone who will do this for them and the reason I'm biased because I currently worried I started a crowdfunding effort yesterday to add feature the picture element blank so and I think that the future should have more of that more people adding features to the open source rendering okay coming forward in the rim guy I think that's a pretty high barrier to entry there isn't it the most web developers yes I as the suggestion it seems I mean if we the sensible web manifesto has been mentioned if we work towards that ideal where we expose more of the kind of primitives that are there in the browsers but we currently have no access to if we expose them to developers then I think we stand a chance of being able to at least iterate more quickly towards an API that we can then standardise I think given the choice between downloading and you know patching Chrome myself or just working around a problem I would work around it like pragmatically it's a little different instead of you know in general the notion of word as the web evolve and I think we're losing sight of the server side like we keep talking about the clients and those components but I think the future of the web lies a lot with services consumed on it and I think clearly all these things and all these devices are part of the technology but what you can do on the web especially in the developing world or in access to banking or facilities or payments via the phone or ordering your groceries or calling a cab all of those components I think are a big part of the future of the web so the fact that it might still be HTML or maybe we're not evolving it is sometimes less critical or the just disruptions that happen on the business side of it on the server side of it okay can we drop the one row forwards I think okay two rows thank you in terms of having an input which is what Andrew was talking to about getting in touch with people I found an inconsistency in SVG I wrote a blog post about it I managed to get in touch with one of the editors of the SVG spec I showed him the thing he's updating the SVG spec to fix that thing it does happen it does work it is out there and you can get involved in it okay go right to the back and then we'll start to close down so we can have examples of times when community input has worked what we need is an example of when it hasn't right when the will of the community has not been exerted over rows of editors so maybe an example of that might be DRM an example might be DRM it's going in browsers and generally speaking that's not what people want okay fine I want to ask Natasha who's sitting right in the front there and put her on the spot because I know that she has something interesting to say about when people are invited to take part they don't to W3C in specific well I've been very fortunate with contributing to W3C I co-chair a group and I'm actually filling Joe's shoes right now it's pretty tough but given all I've got but we need people to help out and we're so grateful that people want to help out and we know there's a membership issue there but if you want to help out on what we're doing in the web group then please come and speak to us there's lots of the W3C guys are moving to using open tools like github and Twitter we have a Twitter account and the W3C is open anyway so if you want to contribute you can and please come and speak to me about that later at the party I'll be very happy to speak to you about that okay so the answer to the question Tom do you want to add that? Yeah the mention of DRM is interesting it's not an area I know I'm not going to speak specifically to DRM but the idea of people who have a vested interest in that kind of technology encroaching on issues of net neutrality is something that I think is really important for us to talk about I mean if we're talking about the future of the web we're talking about a situation where I have to pay my ISP for a group of websites that I'm allowed to visit and I have to extend that package for just 5.99 a month to get access to this other search engine or this website that wasn't on their original list and they couldn't there was some kind of hostility between the two parties or whatever We had a question that we had to skip exactly on this topic but there's a bigger community that needs to be involved in that the web community is a small part of the group of people who are involved in ensuring we keep the kind of net neutrality or maintain the kind of net neutrality that we wish to have and it's not my area of expertise but I just, I sometimes feel like we sort of close ourselves in and say well let's keep the web bit of this good the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, that stack this good as long as we look after this everything else would be fine sometimes I wish we could take a step back and say well you know what maybe we could stop worrying about that for a bit and say let's get the people who work on the networking hardware and do all these other aspects and bring us all together to make sure we can going forward keep the the web and the internet in the way we'd like it to be Okay, thank you Now, this is unscripted Alice and I have downed the line in 3 words then to close us out Andrew, what is the future of the web? I don't know I don't know I don't know Tom Kids Freedom Help Scott, I don't know Lots of arguing Andrew, are you going to give the privilege of being last time? I'll just say connected Connected Re-decentralisation Just because I like that word and data and data Okay, thank you very much to our panel


Another story, weren't they? Don't shout and do a problem, I'm just trying to talk. Don't worry, there's plenty of coverage out there. Yeah, I know. Drone Tech Politics, you can find me there. I must come back? Why?    I'm not.   Sure you do. I do. You're doing just what that kid did. The kid stood there, silent. Yeah, you're trying to stop. You're doing worse. You're interrupting us. You're worse. Why don't you guys want to talk about inconvenient facts? I've got a crowd.


Hi, everyone. Mika's very hard to follow. I'll just say that. So, as she already said, I'm Lisa Cam, and I'm here to talk to you about product leadership and some of what I've observed and things I've seen as I transitioned from a large technology company into traditional media. I'll be talking about some of the differences between FANG and the New York Times and corporate insights both from my experiences at Google and from some colleagues who came to the Times from Facebook and Amazon as they've observed very similar things. So, first of all, who am I and why am I talking about this? I spent time, I started in tech at several tech startups, none of which still exist and none of which you've ever heard of. So, those logos did not make the screen. I then spent a long time at IBM where I worked on IBM.com, and then went and did stints at two financial services companies. At the time, and this was a while ago, I found that they were not as focused on technology as I wanted to be, and they were really treating technology at that time as sort of second-class citizens. So, I left, I went to Google and said, I will never go back to a non-technology company. Okay, so, I then spent 12 years at Google, foreign user experience, and eight in product management. Switching into product management at Google was really hard. I didn't fit the classic mold of a product manager, but the opportunity to work there as a product manager was phenomenal. I learned so much, and my understanding of what works, what doesn't was just really strong after that. Little over three years ago, I was recruited to the New York Times, and it was a really exciting opportunity, but I had this moment of thinking, it's not a tech company. But as I thought about it more, I realized that in the 12 years I'd been at Google, the entire world had changed, and that while no the New York Times isn't known for being a tech company, every company is a tech company in some ways these days. Every company needs tech to move forward and to move ahead. And so I thought about it, and I talked to the folks, and decided it was worth a shot. They really seemed to know what they wanted tech to do and why they needed it. So I took a chance and went from a Fang company to a company that's 171 years old. I'll be talking about four different areas of similarities and differences I saw between my time at Google and my experiences at the New York Times. Google and the New York Times are both companies with huge ambition and huge impact, but I'd say at the times there's sort of a much sharper sense of mission and purpose. Deep customer focus is key to all products. Fang companies know this better than anyone else, they know this really well. We have a deep customer focus, but it's a more designed and targeted one. We target our readers, our journalists, and our engineers. Core product skills remain very similar, but we have to look a lot to creativity and reinvention. We've been delivering papers to doorsteps for a very long time, and that's not our focus, our primary focus now. We still do that. We still do that. Subscribe, it's awesome. But we also do draw on that legacy to do a whole lot more. Lastly, much of how we work is similar, but I've seen some really notable differences in scope, impact, and flexibility. I'm going to give some quick context of how the Times is structured. I've found that understanding org structure can be really critical to understanding how companies work and how things play out. Plus, our org structure is a little unusual. At the top of the slide, in its own line, in its own spot, I have the newsroom. The newsroom is really its own organization. It has its own reporting line, it doesn't even report into the CEO. It is its own thing with its own independent direction. It's fascinating. There are a customer and a collaborator, and I'll talk more about that. But the key thing is that really they're a part of a separate organization, and they are a separate organization. Within our digital product org, which we call X-Fun, we generally report along functional lines. And the functions are very similar to what you'd see at a tech company. Product, marketing, tech design, PMO. Somehow I am not rattling through them all right now, but the functions are really how we grow talent, grow people, and make sure that people understand what it means to be a great product manager or a great engineer and understand those sort of functional areas. The X-Fun were also grouped into missions, which enables us to have clear leadership across common groupings of work. I, for example, lead the core platforms mission, which builds a lot of underlying technology, and as such, I work with leadership across all of the other missions to be sure we're all sort of heading in the same direction and are aligned on a set of priorities. Now that I've covered org structure, let's move on to some of the actual work. As I mentioned earlier, at the times we have really significant impact and ambition. You'll find people at the times are every bit as driven to do great work as what you'd see at any fang company. But in addition, we've got a really sharp mission in focus, and that mission and purpose really drives why so many people are there and doing the work we're doing. Our mission, to seek truth and help people understand the world. Big mission, but it's been our mission for over 100 years. It's a mission that we believe is deeply meaningful, and for all of us who work here, it's really... We're here in part because of that mission. It's a real driver and a real motivator. The journalism matters, making independent journalism accessible and available matters. And growing our business matters by extension, growing our revenue is how we continue to support and invest in the newsroom to continue to move ahead. That said, for the last 15 years, our industry has faced an existential transformation. We've needed to radically change our business model to survive. In 2011, we released our paywall. At the time, it was not popular, and consultants said there might be a million people in the world who'd be willing to pay for a subscription. Might. Companies said, OK, and got to work. Over the next several years, they saw what worked, what didn't, and really grew their ambition till the publicly stated goal was to hit 10 million subscriptions by the end of 2025. We actually hit that number last year. So despite those successes, we think we've only hit a relatively small share of what we view as our potential market. As our CEO noted during our investor day, we see the potential target audience of English language readers who would be interested in news, sports, shopping recommendations, all we have to offer, as closer to 135 million adults. And those are people we believe are willing to pay for one or more English language subscriptions. So with that, since we apparently can't just keep a nice simple goal, our new goal is to hit 15 million subscribers by 2027. And to do that, we're going to need to double our 20 to 21 subscriber base. The Times is a company with remarkable impact. The scale we operate can feel immense. But I sometimes describe The Times as a company that punches above its weight. Our influence outweighs our size. The entire company is only about 5,800 people, and 2,600 of those are in our newsroom working on the news gathering and reporting side of the business. So we're tiny compared to a company like Google. And while big news events, such as our election coverage, bring in traffic that is massive for journalism, we just don't operate at the scale of a Fang company. Fang companies, for everything they do, have billions of users a day. That said, this can actually provide some great opportunities for product managers in many ways we can move faster and cover a much broader spectrum of the stack with every product we work on. To trade off, I've certainly known people at Google who have spent a full year for one box on the search results screen. And that box is going to be seen billions of times. But personally, I find it a lot more compelling to work on some of the bigger, more strategic projects that are possible to do at a smaller, more agile organization. Our clarity of mission has also allowed us to develop a single, clear product vision that's across our entire product suite. We aim to be the essential subscription for every curious English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world. And we very much have a mission-first approach to product development. Google started as a technology-driven company, and that approach has led to incredible advances. But as a product manager, it could be frustrating at times. I'd have an engineer come up to me with something really, really cool they've developed and say, you're the product manager. I need a use for this. Sometimes there was a use, sometimes there wasn't. There's no question that giving the engineers the freedom to explore and create new technologies is amazing. And one of the ways Google has been so successful, the engineers who engage in deep research change the world, but they don't necessarily know the next step and how to maximize the impact and how to drive that forward. And it creates some odd tensions at times. I've heard similar stories from friends and colleagues at Amazon and Meta. As a much smaller company, our entire product development org is small compared to a fang. We need to be much more strategic in what we work on. That's where having a clear sense of mission and vision becomes so critical. So at the times we have developed a clear product vision, so we know where we need to be. Having such a clear vision also enables us to break our work down into core strategic goals we are pursuing. Once again, critical to providing a sense of direction and providing more clarity around what work to prioritize. We want to be the best news destination in the world. That's first and foremost. The ability to create and deliver impactful, independent journalism is the cornerstone of everything we do. We're also looking to become a more important part of people's everyday lives. Sometimes people are looking for timely news or investigative reporting. Other days, they may want to play wordle or get shopping recommendations or catch up on what their favorite sports team is doing. These are all different sorts of needs we can help. There is so much we do across different parts of daily life, but people aren't always aware of that. So we've really shifted to having a major focus be on our bundle and how to connect people across all of the different products we own. We really see an incredible synergy between that core news and the lifestyle products that support a series of everyday needs. To deliver on that, we're really working, and one of the key product focuses we have these days is driving the connections between the areas. News should help people find other content, and the other apps should point people back to the news if it's appropriate and contextual, when it makes sense. We also just know from all of our research that people who engage with more than one of our products have better overall engagement rates and better retention rates. So we really want to be sure people are engaging across a wide swath so they understand the value they're getting. Next, I'm going to move on to customer focus. Customer focus is critical. While our TAM is much, much smaller than that of a Fenton company, customer focus remains important no matter what the company or the TAM size is. I mean, customer focus is the core of product management. Bank companies are amazing in having a strong commitment to it. Amazon's mission is explicitly focused on customer-centric innovation and it's really the core of any iterative product work. This requires PMs to be data-driven, understand the customers they're serving, understand the problems they're solving, and know how to move forward with that. We do a lot of research and develop much of our product roadmaps and direction based on what we find from that research and what we understand about how people use our products. As I said, we're very data-driven. One example is focusing on features and what features we should build. We're very much looking to drive engagement and retention within each product. I've already spoken about our desire to drive engagement and connection across the products, but we want each product to have its own sort of sticky and strong nature. So we've done really deep research. This shows features that are better for engagement or retention and gives a sense of how we will do some prioritization around where we're going. In the last slide, I talked about our customer focus and the data-driven nature of our work. The external-facing parts of our work are the most familiar to people, but we have some really important internal customers who also require significant focus. My organization develops platforms, which enables others at the time to deliver content and features that will reach our readers. But I need to think about multiple sets of customers simultaneously. The readers are the obvious ones. Readers, gamers, everyone who comes to us and uses all the things on our site. But next, we have the newsroom. The newsroom is both a collaborator but also an absolute first-class customer of ours. We need to meet their needs. We need to understand their needs. We need to deliver against their needs, which is a very different type of customer than you would find in a lot of companies. And lastly, the engineers. We have to be sure our engineers can develop and deliver and really be able to do some of the best, most impactful work of their lives. It's really hard because we're a smaller organization, so our platforms need to be really empowering. The net result of all of this is that we're really looking across three different, very specific sets of customers and having to deliver against the needs of each of them. Core product skills. The core product skills we focus on at the times will feel very, very familiar to people in technology companies. There are very few things about our product job ladder that would be a surprise. Strategy, leadership, execution, these are always critical. Cross-functional collaboration is another area we focus on, both across product and technology teams, but we also have to collaborate with the newsroom and ensure our work is supporting theirs. The other major set of skills we lean really heavily into are creativity and re-evention. Many tech companies talk about disrupting an industry, but we are the industry we're disrupting. We've always been looking at how to reinvent what it is that we do in order to drive forward the same mission we've had for such a long time. When the New York Times was solely a physical paper delivered to doorsteps, life coverage wasn't something you could have even conceived of. We now regularly run live coverage on our site, enabling people to get deep insights from our highly knowledgeable journalists as events are unfolding. Likewise, we've just launched an audio app, which enables a new method for people to access valuable content we create in different ways and provides our subscribers the ability to listen to content and interact with our content in situations such as driving, where reading just isn't possible. Product people need to be able to look at what we have and develop ways to more deeply engage our readers and empower our journalists while iterating and reinventing the content and against the mission we've had for such a long time. Next up, how we work. At the team level, we bring together a collection of different skills to deliver on specific initiatives. The exact composition of the teams varies depending on the goals of the project, but at the core, we're working cross-functionally to deliver against our priorities. This is a very familiar model. Working in cross-functional teams is very familiar. This is how we generally worked at Google. I do find there are several significant differences in how we work to how a large technology company works. Some of them, as a result of differences in size of the organization, we are just much smaller. Others are more closely tied to the unique nature of our business. At the beginning of this presentation, I talked about the reach of the New York Times and how we deliver with a team of fraction the size of a Fang company.  We do have impact. We drive a lot of impact, but it's often in getting information out in the legislation that may come as a result of our investigative journalism as the next step. So impact is a different beast in some ways. Scale also turns out to be a mixed blessing, and scale doesn't fully align with scope and impact. Google's small pieces of work in very complex environments take so long, but billions of people see the outcome. A colleague of mine who came to the Times from Amazon observed the same thing. At the Times, you get the opportunity to have increased breadth in your work, but you need to take a bigger swing to deliver on it. He described the environment at Amazon as one where there weren't so many green-filled spaces and there weren't so many spaces where you could really move ahead without stepping on other toes. As a smaller organization, deeply focused on our transformation, people have had the opportunity to lead much broader initiatives and have more impact against the whole of our products. And that impact is phenomenal. It just isn't billions of views. Flexibility is also really key. New cycles are not always predictable. My first week at the New York Times was the week before we all went remote for COVID. That was certainly a situation in which every road map, every plan, every direction, everything was tossed out the window in order to allow us to focus on the public service functions of the Times, which meant sharing everything we could about health and safety outside of the paywall so it would be available to anyone who needed it. We also have found situations that are more amusing where we have a plan to launch something.  We postpone the launch a couple of days. The news story doesn't happen. Okay, well, whatever. Then we launch, and then the news story breaks, and suddenly we've got massive traffic, and it's like, oh, this was not what we wanted for launch day. The most recent time that happened was just a couple of weeks ago, and everything was awesome and it went well, but there was still that moment of, we just rearranged everything to avoid this. So flexibility is key when you're in an organization where you just don't control the timelines. Another difference I see is that many of our product managers work in areas that just aren't as much a part of the Fang companies. At the times we create and we distribute much of our own content, so product managers can work incredibly closely with the journalism who are developing that content and help them with creating the content types. They also work on our publishing tools, product managers, which cover everything from underlying systems and infrastructures through new features through the content itself. On the platform side, we need to be delivering work to support our growth and business models. At the same time, we're working to modernize parts of the technology step, of our technology stack that have been put to uses that were never conceived of when they were built. It really gives product a much more end-to-end role in the work and in shaping the formats and platforms we use. Fang companies tend to be quite specific in what they're looking for in product managers, though it's absolutely loosened up over the years. When I transferred into product to Google, there were a lot of hoops to jump through. One of the things I've really loved about being outside of Fang company is how much more opportunity there has been for people who haven't come from sort of more traditional product management-type backgrounds to transition in. It's been great to watch that change, see how open the company is to a broader range of product backgrounds and see how much success we've had because of it. We have highly technical PMs who would be right at home at a Fang company. We also have people who are great at working with the newsroom and great at connecting people. And we have people just across such a wide range of skill sets that it's been really fun and just great to watch. So just to wrap it up, much of what we do at the Times would feel quite familiar to people at Fang companies, but we do have differences, which leads to different focuses and some different priorities. So with that, I'd like to thank everybody for the opportunity to speak today. I hope this has been useful in giving a sense of some of the product work we can do in. Thank you.