Hey, thanks for checking this out! The web is super cool, and we have the ability to contribute to and evolve it via web standards. This repository is meant to be a one-stop-shop for getting involved with the web platform. There is a ton of information, and this page attempts to summarize it. If you feel something important is either missing or could be changed up a bit, feel free to submit a PR.
So yeah, I'm a part of an organization called the WHATWG, and we work on standardizing the web platform. Here are some useful links:
When it comes to contributing to web standards or making changes to the platform, the process can be quite lengthy and difficult. Just understanding how web standards work is one thing, but getting browsers to agree to a change that can affect millions can be pretty different. The WHATWG has defined a process that generally all platform changes follow. This process and some background is defined on the website here. Typically two major browsers must be on board with a platform change for it to land into the standard. Agreement amongst the different browser vendors and implementers is important to make sure we're not developing useless features for the web that will never be adopted. More information on this process can be found on the Working Mode section of the WHATWG site.
Finally if you're interested in contrubiting to web standards I encourage you to check out Domenic Denicola's talk How to win friends and influence standards bodies talk on YouTube. It's got some really good information on how to interface with standards bodies, and talks about how the process works. I'd consider watching it a prereq for getting involved.
Interoperability is really important on the web platform, so when we make a change we back it up by tests. There is a community group that maintains a universal test suite called web-platform-tests, and basically it aims to test every observable feature on the web platform. All of the tests are run on the four major browsers frequently, and you can use the dashboard (WPT FYI) to see the status of each test as it ran on each browser. We're always writing more tests and fixing ones that don't work too easily. If you're interested in getting involved, feel free to check out some WHATWG pull requests labeled needs tests to help us keep the web platform continually tested.
The slides for the talk can be found in the root of this repository (both Keynote and PDF format), or on slideshare as well.