Open Web Foundation launches Video

Open Web Foundation launches Video Transcript

[ Music ] ^M00:00:05

>> All right. So Dave Recordon. You're at Six Apart and the Open Web Foundation and the OpenID Foundation...

>> Open ID Foundation, yeah.

>> Open ID Foundation? Okay.

>> Yeah. Hopefully we're not gonna get too many more foundations coming out of this.

>> Okay. So you're announcing yet another foundation, the Open Web Foundation. What is it?

>> So the Open Web Foundation is really designed to be a place where a broad community of individuals and companies can come together and work on open specification to really support the open web. So one of the trends that we've been seeing is with communities like OpenID and OR and OpenSocial and O Invent, and Portable Contacts, all of these open web communities coming together, developing specifications, but doing them outside of formal standards bodies. So we're really hoping to be able to give them a home where they can come and work together, and do it in a way that's a understood legal process, so that big companies have an easy way to participate.

>> So you're trying to bring together standards that are still emerging under one umbrella?

>> So it's -- I mean some aspects of it. So, for something like OpenID, you could theoretically have the technical work move -- I'm not saying that it's going to right now -- but then still have the OpenID Foundation become -- it would be a really valuable resource for providing developer resources, marketing resources, all the sorts of things that are needed beyond just the technology itself.

>> Okay. So what's the problem, exactly, this is solving?

>> So the problem that a lot of us are feeling -- and I'm really involved with this along with Scott Crebedin [assumed spelling] and DeWitt Clinton [assumed spelling] and a whole slew of other people as well -- is that as these technologies are being developed, it's a really rapid pace. Owath [phonetic] was nine months between -- it was written as a spec and finalized, and Google shifted in production. So we need a way that the companies can get involved and understand, sort of, the intellectual property rights that have to do with that. So far the solution to that has been that we go and create a nonprofit foundation for each individual community and each individual technology. And, you know what? Lawyers and the community are getting sick and tired of doing that. So just as there's the Apache Software Foundation, which helps do a lot of this sort of thing for source code, in terms of building great communities and working in an understood process, we wanted to do the same sort of thing, but for specifications.

>> So you're trying to provide kind of a framework and structure for developing standards bodies, but you're not getting into the technical of the standards themselves.

>> So we're not creating standards. We're creating open specifications. And this would be a place where the technical work would go on. So it's specification could come in, go through the incubation process, and some of the things that we'd look for to judge that would be does it have a diverse community? Is it being implemented across the web? Are there good open source reference implementations? And is all the intellectual property clean?

>> So it sounds like you're solving a definite issue and a definite problem, but by adding another layer of bureaucracy on top of it.

>> So I think our goal is -- well, yes. We are creating a foundation. Very good call there. But in -- what we are seeing is that if we don't do this, we're going to have go and create another half dozen of these over the next year. So we'd much rather try to create one, and create a place where these communities can come together, than have to keep going through this process of creating nonprofits for each of these technologies that keeps coming about.

>> All right. So who's involved?

>> So a whole slew of people. An entire group of individuals as well as a bunch of companies, some of the big names on the web such as Google and Yahoo and MySpace, BBC, hopefully Six Apart's involved. Facebook as well, as they announced at [inaudible] , but really focused on the community of individuals who are going to be coming together and actually make this work happen.

>> Okay. And when will we see the fruits of this?

>> So our goal is sort of within the next weeks to months, having the actual foundation together, having projects starting to go through the incubation phase. And I think that's really going to be the interesting piece. I mean Thursday we announced that this is going to happen, but for me, the exciting part is going to be when we have that first project going through incubation.

>> And what do you think that will be?

>> I don't know what it will be. I'm -- I might put my money on something like the Portable Contact's API, which Fox has been really involved in with moving forward.

>> Okay. Thanks a lot, David.

>> Yeah, definitely. Thank you. ^M00:04:05 [ Music ]