The CSIRO ICT Centre has won a competitive bid to host the Australian office of the World Wide Web Consortium (also commonly referred to as W3C), which is the international body that sets standards for the web. I actually heard about the decision a few weeks back from Ross Ackland (the new W3C Australian Office Manager), but it was finally publicly announced in a CSIRO press release yesterday. The office will officially move from the DSTC Co-operative Research Centre (which is winding up after 7 years of operation) to the ICT Centre in Canberra effective from 10 October 2005.

What exactly does this mean? Well for one thing, it means that CSIRO now takes on the role to promote the W3C mission in Australia. The W3C summarises this role as:

To promote adoption of W3C recommendations among developers, application builders, and standards setters, and to encourage inclusion of stakeholder organizations in the creation of future recommendations by joining W3C.

The role also explicitly includes promoting the W3C’s patent policy, which governs the handling of patents in the process of producing Web standards and aims to ensure that Recommendations produced under the W3C policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.

In concrete terms, I hope to see a bunch of W3C related activity around the ICT Centre – seminars, workshops, standards discussions and the like. If you’re interested, the W3C has much more information about the role of W3C Offices.