On January 14th the W3C Benelux Office hosted by CWI and many local internet and ICT-related organizations jointly organized a new years event in Amsterdam to celebrate the start of the new year. The event took place at NEMO (a Science Museum), Oosterdok 2 in Amsterdam. After a buffet at 18:00 the event started at 19:00 accompanied by a lot of parallel talks and activities. While the main space was reserved for drinks and conversation only there were a lot of interesting 'lightning talks' in the lecture hall. A highlight was the "Chairman's debate" with Olaf Kolkman (NLnet Labs), Erik Huizer (IPv6 Forum), Jan Willem Broekema (ISOC), Peter-Paul Koch (Fronteers), Cees de Laat (Gridforum), Rob Blokzijl (RIPE) and Bert Bakker (OpenDoc Society).
WGAG 2.0 Seminar
Already in December last year the W3C Benelux Office organized together with the Foundation Accessibility and ISOC.nl a seminar on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The event took place in the Royal Library The Hague. Michiel Leenaars (Director ISOC.nl and member of the board of Accessibility) chaired the event. Speakers were Eric Velleman (Foundation Accessibility), Paul Timmers (Head of Unit for ICT for Inclusion in the European Commission), Imke Arts - Vrijling (Ministery BZK), Raph de Rooij (ICTU), Robert Jan Verkade (EEND) and Shadi Abou Zahra (W3C). 73 people attended the seminar. More than half of them were from the government.
W3C Spain Office held three Workshops on W3C Web Standards
The W3C Spain Office organized three workshops on W3C Web Standards in November and December 2009. These workshops were held in three public Spanish universities: Universidad de Murcia, Universidad de Granada, and Universidad de La Laguna. All of them showed great interest in co-organizing the event, and they suggested important topics not enough represented in the current curricula such as Web standards or the W3C's role in the success of the Web.
ERCIM is the European host of W3C. Five of the nine European W3C offices are hosted by ERCIM members institutes.
More information:
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Offices/
