People Send Us Things, Part I: The World Wide Web Foundation

We like getting e-mail, tweets, and feed shares about cool stuff that you think we should blog about.  We also like creating new “series” of posts to a) establish sub-themes for the blog, b) encourage us to keep posting, and c) give us some shadow of legitimacy to hold onto.  Additionally, if you can’t tell, prepositions are my favorite things to end sentences with.  Thus is born a series we’re going to call “People Send Us Things”, and this story passed to us by Brika is just what we were looking… for.

Not too many people can legitimately include anything approaching the following in their bio/resume:

In 1989 he invented the World Wide Web.

Boom.  Street Geek cred: check.  The man who created teh internetz is none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and he’s on to a new project — the World Wide Web Foundation.  This organization seeks to do the following:

• 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.

Huh… that mission statement kinda reminds me of this little start-up in Mountain View.  Anyway…

The WWW Foundation identifies several areas of attack:

The Web is a complex system of social and technological forces that is not fully understood. In order to increase the impact of the Web, we must deepen our knowledge of when it works and why it fails.

The Web is in its infancy. As technology evolves, it must remain well-integrated so that change does not lead to instability. New technologies must remain free, open, and capable of meeting the information needs of humanity.

Only about 20% of the world’s people access the Web. Even for those who do have access, more can be done to enable people to collaborate and share information in order to meet basic human needs.

So what exactly are they going to do, anyway?  Well, they’ve broken their efforts into three programs that parallel the bullet points above.  The Web Science and Research effort seeks a better understanding of the Web: how it works, what issues matter most to its users, and how to secure it.  The Web Technology and Practice component lobbies for widespread adoption of standards that will ensure further development of the Internet and facilitate “creativity, collaboration, communication, and commerce.”  Finally, the idea behind Web for Society is to study how these technologies can best be used to help and empower underserved or disadvantaged populations, be it developing nations in Africa or blind veterans in Arizona.

Fairly ambitious, no?  Because its objectives and plans are vague (perhaps necessarily so), it’s hard to know what impact this group will have.  Somebody believes in them, though, since they just picked up a $5 million seed grant from the Knight Foundation.  They’ll continue to seek funding with the objective of officially launching next year.

In essence, their three-stroke model is study, streamline, and apply.  Though they list (again, vague) methods by which they hope to accomplish these feats, it will take a lot more than words to succeed.  I am curious as to how, specifically, they plan to use the money they raise to promote web standards.  How do you make yourself heard among the tech titans who may have their own ideas about how to do things?  Will they have enough resources to both study how underserved populations can benefit from the web and implement programs to serve them?  Is the new web “science” they are promoting any different than computer science or software engineering disciplines, or is this just a matter of semantics?

All of this seems very vague and very ambitious.  But, hey… I’m not putting anything past the guy who invented the Internet.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user hyoga.  And kudos to Taylor for getting this post started.