Internet Governance Forum 2009 - II - The Web Foundation

The World Wide Web Foundation announced the first day of the forum revealed its mission and objectives.

According to Sir Berners Lee, taking care of the "human side" of the web is possible only by creating a new organization different than the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that is also led by Berners Lee himself.

The foundation's vision is to have a world where everyone can take advantage of the web to collaborate, communicate and access to knowledge and information. This vision is applied to each single habitant of this world, regardless of its origins, country and ability.

Some on-the-ground projects? The foundation has already started two projects: Re-greening Africa, which heavily uses the web to knowledge sharing and communication between farmers in Ghana and Empowering Youth that aims to teach web applications development to young people in undeveloped countries. The good news is that Empowering Youth project will be applied in Jordan as one pilot country with the partnership of the Center for Digital Inclusion (CDI), of course, Jordan Open Source Association is willing to help and we work for future collaboration with the World Wide Web Foundation in this project.

The foundation's members had a good workshop and several relevant topics were discussed. I was one of the guys who asked about the differences between the two World Wide Web organizations, what are the things the foundation is able to do an the consortium is not? What is the added-value of the foundation compared to the huge number of associations which work for the same objectives and principles? Daniel Dardailler, program manager of the foundation, although he cited the W3C multiple times in his speech, stressed the difference between the technical, standards body consortium and the new-born foundation; a philanthropic non-profit organization that makes web more accessible and available to all.

As the head of the Jordan Open Source Association I have also asked with others, about the openness and royalty-free policy of the foundation. We got very assuring answers as well as plans to promote open content by the foundation, Stephane Boyera wrote:

Another key discussion was around intellectual property, and the importance of open source and free content, not only at the tools level, but also in the different materials and tools developed by the thousands of projects in the field. This is an area we will surely investigate further.

Want to know more about the Internet Governance Forum? Read the Day 1 highlights in Issa's previous post.