Announcing the Open Web Foundation
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.
OpenQL (Open Quick Language) Is looking for assistance with its project. We have done all the hard work, discovering the mathematics behind the technology and then the invention of the Quick Language, now we need assistance bringing it to market.
Is anyone within the group interested in using my technology as a test bed for the foundation?
A preview of the technology will be online any day now, we are just finalizing the Alpha web service @ xmlkiller.com our technology preview site.
So we can replace xml, but that is not all that OpenQL can do,
Our Primary goals are to:
Release the math lessons to the world in every language.
Get OpenQL Standardized for inclusion in programming languages.
Usher in a new era of computer programs where the OpenQL variable declaration can solve problems as well as express binary trees, reducing the actual amount of code that needs to be written, all this with the benefit of being human readable, no more ‘ or ”
You can contact me personally via my website http://nu.fm
OWF is a great development. I got tingles thinking about how far we have come remembering my first OSCON in2004 when I was first evangelizing about identity and personal data layer of the web. http://www.identitywoman.net/?p=776
I’m happy to see this happen – David, Joseph Smarr, you, and others have been working hard at making some actual interoperability between websites. Hopefully we can make this turn into something.
Well done developers, using their product on my site!