ELASTIC Releases Public Webinar on W3C/WASI Standardisation

The ELASTIC project is pleased to announce the public release of the W3C/WASI Standardisation Webinar, originally organised as an internal training workshop for ELASTIC partners and now made available to the wider community through the ELASTIC YouTube channel.

The webinar was delivered by Dr. Merlijn Sebrechts from imec and Ghent University on 27 April 2026 and provides a practical introduction to the standardisation pathways for WebAssembly and the WebAssembly System Interface, commonly known as WASI.

Supporting Open Standards and Community Engagement

WebAssembly is increasingly relevant beyond the browser, offering a lightweight, portable, and secure execution model for modern distributed systems. In the context of ELASTIC, WebAssembly plays an important role in enabling efficient and trustworthy workload execution across heterogeneous environments, including IoT devices, edge nodes, private infrastructures, and public clouds.

WASI extends this vision by providing standardised system interfaces that allow WebAssembly components to interact with operating systems, devices, networks, and runtime environments beyond the browser. This is particularly relevant for edge-cloud orchestration, 6G systems, confidential computing, and secure distributed services.

By making this webinar publicly available, ELASTIC aims to support knowledge sharing and encourage broader engagement with open standardisation communities.

What the Webinar Covers

The webinar explains the difference between Core WebAssembly and WASI standardisation. Core WebAssembly focuses on features relevant to browsers, such as new instructions, memory changes, and control-flow extensions. WASI, on the other hand, focuses on system interfaces and the component model, including APIs for peripherals, messaging, observability, cryptography, and machine learning. WASI generally focuses on non-browser use cases.

The session also introduces the key organisations and communities involved in the standardisation process, including the World Wide Web Consortium, the WebAssembly Community Group, the WebAssembly Working Group, and the Bytecode Alliance.

Participants are guided through the phased standardisation processes for both WebAssembly and WASI proposals, including how proposals move from initial ideas to more mature specifications through community discussion, consensus-building, implementation, and formal voting.

Practical Guidance for Contributors

A key part of the webinar is its practical focus. Dr. Sebrechts explains how contributors can engage with the WASI standardisation process, including how to join the WebAssembly Community Group, identify upcoming meetings, propose agenda items through GitHub pull requests, and participate in discussions.

The webinar also presents the wasi-spi proposal as an example, showing how a WASI proposal can be structured through goals, design documentation, WIT interface definitions, champions, and implementation repositories.

Webinar Material Available Online

The full W3C/WASI Standardisation Webinar material is now publicly available, including both the webinar recording and the accompanying presentation slides.

The slides are available on Zenodo:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20354479

The recording is available on the ELASTIC YouTube channel:
https://youtu.be/XAq_XXUUII0

Together, these resources provide a practical introduction to how WebAssembly and WASI standards are developed, how the relevant communities and processes operate, and how researchers, developers, and organisations can engage with open standardisation activities.

About ELASTIC

ELASTIC is developing secure, portable, and efficient orchestration technologies for reliable services across the edge-cloud continuum. The project explores key technologies such as WebAssembly, confidential computing, eBPF, remote attestation, and serverless orchestration to support trustworthy and scalable future digital infrastructures.

Acknowledgement
ELASTIC project has received funding from the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101139067.