Scott Kveton

This morning on stage at OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of the Open Web Foundation (OWF). I wanted to take a few minutes to say congrats to a fantastically diverse and committed bunch of people that have made this possible and tell a little bit about how it came to be.

In May 2008, the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) board had a face-to-face meeting at Google where we were planning for the next year. During that meeting we started to discuss focus and scope of the OIDF and realized that there was a much bigger need in the community of developers creating light-weight, open specifications for the web. Ironically, there were several other people visiting Google that day and over lunch, we hatched an idea that has finally been formalized today.

As a bit of history, when we created the OIDF, we learned quite a bit about what it takes for individuals and companies to come together within a community to develop and open specification. Out of this work, we developed a process for managing IP and copyrights as well as built a strong relationship among a good portion of people working on these problems across the web. It wasn’t all easy and many communities developing other open specifications learned quite a bit from us. We wanted to find a way to make it so others wouldn’t have to go through this hassle ever again.

To answer several of the pain points around getting an open specification to be able to be used in the marketplace and keep community members writing code and specs and not legal documentation, several of us came together to create the Open Web Foundation. I’d talked about this in Februrary at the Social Graph FooCamp and DeWitt has been talking about it for years … :-)

The most up-to-date information about the OWF can be found on the website but there are a few things I’ll mention here. The OWF is an organization modeled after the Apache Software Foundation; we wanted to use a model that has been working and has stood the test of time. The OWF will only focus on specifications; we won’t touch code. There are plenty of other places to do that.

The hard part is yet to come. There is a lot of work to do here but I’m excited to be a part of such a fantastic group of people. I have never seen so many people come together to make something so fantastic happen so quickly. Congrats again, and let’s roll up our sleeves folks.