Official launch of the WWW Foundation, at the IGF - TBL

clipped from elon.edu

Whipping out his smartphone, waving it to an audience of more than 1,500 global Internet experts, and pushing the button to send a Twitter message simultaneously, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee officially unveiled the new World Wide Web Foundation during his keynote talk at the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

“It is my pleasure to officially launch the World Wide Web Foundation here at the IGF,” he said, adding that initial start-up funding is being provided by the Knight Foundation. “We started out with the World Wide Web Consortium - W3C - all kinds of people coming together to decide Web protocols… to keep it one Web. We had the consortium to make standards, which are and were needed… Next we started talking about Web science, and three years ago we started what has now become the Web Science Trust. But to get the Web to serve humanity to its utmost you need more than science. We thought more broadly. Not only do we need standards, not only do we need science, but we need to think about society.”

He said the planning for the new foundation has been in the works for quite some time, and it has involved input from many people who are also involved in work with the Internet Governance Forum. “When we look at the Web, we don’t look at it anymore as connected computers or as connected Web pages,” he explained, “when you look at the Web if you want to understand why it happens you look at people. We look at the Web now as humanity connected. Humanity connected by technology. We want it to empower people. We want it to do the very best for humanity.”

Berner’s Lee’s gleeful announcement was a major highlight of the first day of the Internet Governance Forum, but several other important keynote presenters also took the stage.