Berners-Lee Founds World Wide Web Foundation
The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee yesterday announced the formation of the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization dedicated to keeping the Web free and open and to extending the benefits of the Web to greater numbers of people.
The founding of The Web Foundation is an interesting and important step in the evolution of the Internet but it marks frustration felt by many of the people who started and fostered the dominant culture of sharing on the Internet. The ways the Web has unfolded puts it far from the idealistic aspirations of its founders.
One of the problems Berners-Lee sees with the Web as it exists today is a dangerous lack of credibility. Another is a continuing lack of access to nearly 4/5 of the world’s population. While the Web Foundation might not be able to make information on the Web more credible or build communications infrastructure in the developing world, it can have a lot of clout regarding Web standards and the philosophies they develop from.
Berners-Lee chairs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body that sets coding standards for Web development. Beside him is Steve Bratt, current CEO of the W3C. Bratt will be assuming the title of CEO at the Web Foundation in early 2009. Being two of the creators, Berners-Lee and Bratt are among the most respected and influential voices in tech. In trying to reform the results of his creation however, Berners-Lee might be taking on his biggest challenge yet. The Foundation appears to be an attempt to bring the Web back to its roots.
Originally, the Internet was designed to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers and scientists. The first actual web site was posted on August 6, 1991 by Berners-Lee when he worked for CERN. Very quickly an information culture made up of those who were already similarly informed was formed.
Science is the realm of ideas. Originally, scientists shared their ideas with each other for free. The Web was limited to a small group of people who were suddenly empowered to share and access data. This culture, combined with radically increased computational speed and storage capacity, has underpinned the greatest period of scientific advancement in human history.
That benefit was obvious enough in 1991. By then, the Internet had already allowed an extremely small group of scientists surrounding CERN to share information in ways and with speed few of them dreamed possible a decade earlier. Surely, as the thinking went, opening the Internet to the general public would lead to a similar surge in cultural and personal developments.
