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As part of its interaction with the larger standards-making community, the DAA Standards Committee is participating in a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) project with the potential to alter the data collection landscape.  This project, the W3C Digital Data Customer Experience Community Group (http://www.w3.org/community/custexpdata/), seeks to standardize how data is collected on the devices of website visitors.  The group is poised to deliver its initial version of the specification by early 2014.  If broadly adopted by tool vendors, this specification could usher in a new generation of analytics tools and analysis capability.

Mission
This Community Group is an initial stage of specification development seeking to identify common ground on tracking data and related privacy issues.   The product of this group will be an initial specification of commonly-collected tracking data with a methodology for extending the set.  If the Community Group is successful, a logical next step would be chartering a W3C Working Group to continue developing the initial specification into an official W3C Standard.

History
This W3C Digital Data Customer Experience Community Group grew out of two efforts to standardize the tracking data being collected for a variety of domains.  In Fall 2012 IBM presented its standardization approach at a W3C workshop discussing future directions for online tracking. Meanwhile, Google, QuBit, and other organizations were forming an alliance with the goal of tracking data standardization.  When the two group became aware of the substantial overlap of the two initiatives, they decided to join forces.
The resulting W3C Community Group was launched in late 2012 and has already made good progress.  An initial specification has been drafted with data items documented in JSON format: (http://www.w3.org/community/custexpdata/wiki/images/9/93/W3C_CustomerExperienceDigitalDataAcquisition_Draft_v0.5.pdf). 
Parts of this implementation have seen limited testing and at this stage vendors seem ready to update their products to follow the future standard.

The current plan is to complete the specification by year end.  The project is gaining new members and supporters as the specification becomes more concrete.  The work has already received early publicity in the analytics world and will receive more when the specification is officially released.  Akin Arikan’s blog post is an early example:
http://www.smartercommerceblog.com/smartermarketing/2013/04/25/the-coming-new-standard-for-digital-data-collection-via-tags/

DAA activity with this group
The leaders of this group sought the DAA’s involvement in this project from the early stages.  The DAA officially joined this project in 2012 and is participating as a full voting member of the group.
Eric Feinberg and I are members of the Community Group, and I’m also a member of its Privacy Subgroup.  Standards Committee members such as Phil Pearce have also been supporting this effort by reviewing content and providing feedback.

Next Steps
The Community Group is still reaching consensus on several issues.  As those issues are resolved, their relevant documentation will be added to the specification.  When the specification is ready, the Community Group will release it for broader review and discussion and we’ll be seeking your input.  Watch for more updates in this blog and also the DAA newsletter in coming months.