Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

WaSP Emeritus

Tantek Çelik is Chief Technologist at Technorati where he leads the design and development of new standards and technologies. Prior to Technorati, he was a veteran representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for Microsoft, where he also helped lead the development of the award-winning Internet Explorer for Macintosh.

As co-founder of the microformats.org community and the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, as well as Steering Committee member of the Web Standards Project and invited expert to the W3C Cascading Style Sheets working group, Tantek is dedicated to advancing open standards and simpler data formats for the Web.

The microformats community believes that standards should do less, not more. Data formats should adapt to current web publishing behaviors and reuse existing broadly interoperably implemented standards. Easy to adopt formats are enabling a diverse set of web designers and developers to visibly publish, share, and consume all kinds of common information, and microformats are leading the way.

Inspired by the can-do Webzine 2005 organizers (of which Tantek was one), and Tim O’Reilly’s FooCamp, Tantek came up with the idea that a half dozen enthusiasts with no previous conference organizing experience could put on an independent, open, and highly participatory weekend conference, and BarCamp was born this past fall in San Francisco in only six days. Since the first BarCamp was organized on a wiki, its DNA open for all to see, BarCamps have been subsequently duplicated in Amsterdam and Toronto, and are planned in Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas, Phoenix, Portland, DC, Boston, and Ottawa. Want to organize your own BarCamp in your city? Start at barcamp.org.

Tantek lives in San Francisco, and has Bachelor’s and Masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as a strong background in human interface and user centered design from his many years at Apple Computer. He shares his thoughts at tantek.com.