Sir Tim Berners-Lee is on a mission to keep the Web open, free and
serving the needs of society — such as calling out sites that spread false
information and helping to support democracy.
The conduit for this latest push to protect and improve the Web? The World Wide
Web Foundation, which the founder of the Web launched yesterday with the
help of $5 million in seed money from the Knight Foundation, which exists to support journalistic endeavors and community building.
He said the seed money will help the Web Foundation with three key
purposes:
“The Web Foundation will bring together business leaders, technology
innovators, academia, government, NGOs, and experts in many fields to tackle
challenges that, like the Web, are global in scale,” he said in
prepared remarks.
“Through research, technology development and the application of the Web
for the benefit of underserved communities, the foundation seeks to enable
all people to share knowledge, access services, conduct commerce,
participate in good governance, and communicate in creative ways.”
Berners-Lee recently gave press interviews in London that expressed
concerns for what he called an effort to spread disinformation about the
Web.
He was referring to recent false reports that claimed that the Large
Hadron Collider experiment, which CERN (the European Organization for
Nuclear Research) is using to study the cosmos, could create a black hole
that could swallow the earth. Berners-Lee worked with CERN to create the
Web. His comments also came after hackers reportedly cracked into CERN’s computers in a bid to point out weak
spots in the system’s security.
It was this example, as well as his concern about making sure less networked spots of the globe can benefit from the Web that Sir Tim wants to address through the Web Foundation. “The Web is a
tremendous platform for innovation, but we face a number of challenges to
making it more useful, in particular to people in underserved communities,”
he said in a release announcing the launch.
“Through this new initiative, we hope to develop an international
ecosystem that will help shape the future Web. A more inclusive Web will
benefit us all.”
The groups said social development efforts will focus initially on
underserved populations. From there, the groups added, the Web foundation
will identify benefits of the Web for these communities, and issues of
access to (and availability of) relevant, usable and useful content. The
foundation will do so through support of ongoing and new efforts to develop
critical services related to better health care, nutrition, education, and
emergency relief.