The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has established a new foundation to tackle the global challenges facing the world in the coming years.
His new organisation, the Web Foundation, goes under the tagline ‘humanity connected’ and will be led by Steve Bratt, who is also CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web for global information sharing while working at CERN. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990 and refined URLs, HTTP and HTML as the web technology spread around the globe.
The Web Foundation aims to bring together business leaders, technology innovators, academia, governments, NGOs and experts in many fields to tackle challenges that, like the web, are global in scale.
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.
“By funding research, technology development and outreach, the Web Foundation strives to enable all people to share knowledge, access services, conduct commerce, participate in good governance and communicate in creative ways,” the organisation states.
The Web Foundation is still in the planning phase and is building relationships with founding donors. A full launch is expected in early 2009.
The foundation will support the creation of interoperable open web standards and will focus on a number of key programmes including web science and research, web technology and practice and the web for society.
The foundation will be funded through a combination of seed funding (between US$1m and US$2m) to cover the cost of setting up, with major donations (between US$50,000 and US$10m) being used to fund key programmes, with supporter programmes funded from smaller contributions and other sources.
By John Kennedy
Pictured: creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has established the Web Foundation, which will tackle the challenges the world will face over the coming years
