Web Foundation founder and Director, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was elected today to the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation. Speaking about Tim and the other new Trustee, social entrepreneur Martin Eakes, Ford President Luis Ubiñas said, “Through their work and in their lives, these individuals have shown a deep commitment to the values of individual opportunity and social justice that lie at the heart of the Ford Foundation’s mission. We are honored to have them join our board and know they will contribute greatly to our work across the globe.”
Archive for September 2011
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named to the Ford Foundation Board
Measuring the Web: Announcing the Web Index
The World Wide Web Foundation is very pleased to announce an exciting new initiative: the World Wide Web Index. We thank Google for a generous grant of US $1 million to the Foundation, which is being leveraged to seed the creation of the Index. I’m thrilled that we are finally able to start on the project, as I have believed in and worked toward this for almost three years. I’m also thrilled that Hania Farhan, with deep experience in the field of developing credible indexes, will be the project manager for this effort.
What is the Web Index? The Web Index will be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web and its impact on people in a large number of countries. It will be a composite index, incorporating political, economic, social, and developmental indicators, as well as indicators of Web connectivity and infrastructure.
Why compile a Web Index? The Index will allow for comparisons of trends over time and across borders. It will provide indications of technical conditions that are present or not present in a country that are at least coincidental with, if not related to, the political, economic and social impact of the Web. This will make it a powerful tool of analysis for policy makers and investors, allowing them to make more effective and better targeted investment strategies. The Index may well raise more questions than it answers, and motivate additional Web Science research into the Web as not just a technology, but as humanity connected by technology.
Mobile 2.0 Conference – HTML5 vs Native Apps
Congratulations to Dan Appelquist from Vodafone, and his co-conspirators, for leading a very engaging forum on the future of mobile applications — Mobile 2.0 — in San Francisco on 1 September. I keynoted at the very first Mobile 2.0 in 2006, so it was good to be back.
Given the plethora of entrepreneurial apps developers in the audience, I spoke on our Mobile Entrepreneurship Initiative as the lunch-time presentation. I showed our video animation, too, and people seemed really locked-in as it played. All of this was a significant diversion from the other topics of the day, which focused on technologies, monetization and the next big things.