World Wide Web Foundation Launched
I’ve long held Sir Tim Berners Lee as one of my life heroes. Not for inventing the Web, because that could have been invented somewhere else by someone else. I admire him for having the vision to see that a free and open web is the path to having a successful web. Had this all cost us, the user, you can be certain that this thriving community, this one machine that spans the world and into which we peer, would still be a bunch of small scale business silos. Tim, and others, provided the technical soil for us to grow this amazing organic machine.
In a speech this week Tim acknowledged the role of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in developing specifications and announced a new organisation with a different purpose. The World Wide Web Foundation, funded by a $200K planning grant from the Knight Foundation, has the mission of bringing the other 80% of the world onto the Web. It’s about empowering and enriching the global community, investing in the necessary sciences and research that we’ll need for the web in the next 5 to 10 years and beyond. The web’s potential is far greater than merely outputting silo web sites and the odd social community.
The mission of the Foundation is:
- to advance One Web that is free and open,
- to expand the Web’s capability and robustness,
- and to extend the Web’s benefits to all people on the planet.
Anyway, I won’t go on ranting about ubiquitous computing or the harnessing of context and the empowerment of the masses with a One Machine. Simply dare to extend yourself to embrace a web that can be so much more than we can even imagine today.
I think the W3C has it’s place. We also need pro-active dreamers, inventors, innovators and experience designers to take us that next step. End of story.
