World Wide Web 25th Anniversary

The first web server, used by Tim Berners-Lee. Photo via Wikipedia

On the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, we’re pleased to share this guest post from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. In this post he reflects on the past, present and future of the web—and encourages the rest of us to fight to keep it free and open. -Ed.

See:

• On the 25th anniversary of the web, let’s keep it free and open

BroadBand Portals of the OECD

Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and inventor of the World Wide Web, talks about the challenges ahead and why an open Internet is key to its continuing success

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The OECD broadband portal provides access to a range of broadband-related statistics gathered by the OECD. Policy makers must examine a range of indicators which reflect the status of individual broadband markets in the OECD. The OECD has indentified five main categories which are important for assessing broadband markets.OECD Broadband Portal

See Also:Ask the Wrong Questions and . . . : the CRTC’s Review of Wireless Competition

My Hat's Off too: Open Hardware Movement

Sir Tim, creator of the World Wide Web, pointed to open data and linked data as exciting examples of the way that the Web is promoting transparency of information and looked forward to the time when the current 20 per cent of the world’s population who can access the Web grows to 80 per cent, with all the changes this will bring in terms of technological and social developments, and new possibilities of communication and cultural change.(bold added by me for emphasis)

Profiting from the Web has it's connotation here in this blog entry to mean, development of societies in regards to the knowledge based and development of individual to widen their boundaries of perspective.

Open Hardware Repository

"Designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware." It is hard to deny that enthusiasm is inspiring and that it can be one of the factors in the success of any enterprise. The statement comes from the Manifesto of the Open Hardware Repository (OHR), which is defined by its creators as a place on the web where electronics designers can collaborate on open-hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the movement for open-source software. Of course, there is more to this than the importance of enthusiasm. Feedback from peers, design reuse and better collaboration with industry are also among the important advantages to working in an open environment.Hardware joins the open movement

Just have to legally read License application in order to see that it is actually a concerted effort to such establishment of an Open Internet agenda ? Why is this important?

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OHR Manifesto

The Open Hardware Repository is a place on the web for electronics designers to collaborate on open hardware designs, much in the philosophy of the free software movement. There are numerous advantages to working in a completely open environment:

• Peer review. If you are a designer in a somewhat small team, or even alone, you can get very useful feedback from others by exposing your ideas in an open space. Chances are somebody has similar interests to yours and more experience.
• Design reuse. The OHR has its origins (and initial scope) in the community of electronics designers working in experimental physics laboratories. One of its goals is to reduce the number of different teams working independently to solve the same problems, in order to make better systems with less time and effort.
• Better collaboration with industry. The current business model for most commercial design companies is to keep the details of design secret. While this might maximize the margins of some companies it has no advantage for the customers. We believe that a business model based on companies designing in the OHR and getting paid for it is perfectly feasible, and would result in better products and the possibility for the customer to improve them and debug them more effectively.
• Last but not least, designing in an open environment is definitely more fun than doing it in isolation, and we firmly believe that having fun results in better hardware.

There are two different areas in the OHR:

• Project pages are under the responsibility of a given project leader. There are two requirements for any project to qualify for OHR support:
  • Everything needed to review and modify the design and to produce the final hardware must be published. This includes schematics and PCB layout in some human-readable open format, bill of materials, mechanical drawings, manufacturing files, etc. Submitting the electronics CAD files in case someone uses the same design software and wants to modify the design is also requested. A project leader is free to use any licensing scheme for a given design, provided it is compatible with the OHR goals stated in this document. Two good candidates for open design are the TAPR Open Hardware License and the CERN Open Hardware License.
  • The project must present an interest to the community of electronics designers for experimental physics facilities. This community being very wide and diverse, we don’t think this is a very troublesome constraint.
• OHR Support is a specific project devoted to the OHR itself. It contains useful information for users and any issue on OHR usage can be reported there.

We hope that the OHR will be a worthy contribution to a change in design paradigms and practices towards more openness and quality. See: http://www.ohwr.org/

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CERN Open Hardware Licence

The CERN Open Hardware License was written for CERN designs hosted in the OHR and can also be used by any designer wishing to share design information using a license compliant with the OSHW definition criteria.

Access to the full text: CERN Open Hardware Licence.

It is important for "such distribution" to understand that the very development of internet through CERN and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as too, Cern being a birth place of internet. The origination of Internet Technologies as a development toward "advancing communication" other then corporate monopolistic control over the internet. Why,  non profit development detriment to not to consider it a  a right to all countries "access to information" with which to advance those societies?

To combat UBB and Vertical Integration. LHC development as a participation of many countries.

Cern must turn their views toward Canada and "current events" in order to understand the importance of such developments with regard to OHR Manifesto.If you can free the consumers/population in Canada then you can free the world to stopping advancing communications constraints and development toward a world population knowledge and developmental bottleneck..

Update: See Also: CERN brings hardware into the open

Make sure you check out the labels to learn some history

Web Science

 

See:Creating a Science of the Web

The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to...understand what the Web is engineer its future ensure its social benefit

...we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.

The Web Science Research Initiative brings together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs and decision makers from around the world. These people will create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design.

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Web Science - helping ensure the healthy development of the future Web Web Science is one of the main opportunities for ensuring the healthy development of the future Web, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, keynote speaker at the conference ‘Profiting from the New Web’, held in London this week.

An audience drawn largely from the technology sector heard Sir Tim outline his hopes for the Web’s future, along with some warnings about potential limitations to the development of the Web.
His keynote set the scene for a full day of discussion about new ways of doing business that have been enabled by the Web and will make a significant difference to business practice in the future.
Sir Tim, creator of the World Wide Web, pointed to open data and linked data as exciting examples of the way that the Web is promoting transparency of information and looked forward to the time when the current 20 per cent of the world’s population who can access the Web grows to 80 per cent, with all the changes this will bring in terms of technological and social developments, and new possibilities of communication and cultural change.

“Maybe our ideas of democracies will be different,” he said. “Maybe people will build systems that we can use to communicate across boundaries … or maybe we won’t …. Whatever happens at this stage we have to think about it - and what we think about it we call Web Science.”
http://webscience.org/article/163.html

 

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The Web has transformed the way you do business. It has transformed your relationships with stakeholders, their interactions with each other and their regard for your brands. This change was difficult to foresee just a decade or so ago. Imagine now what the New Web promises.

The New Web is here now, and the early adopters have begun to put it to work. The earlier your organisation understands what it is, what’s possible and what’s happening today, the sooner you can pursue the opportunities and secure competitive advantage.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and a host of experts bring you up to speed. See: Profiting from the Web

Advancing the Web to Empower People: Challenges and Solutions

Advancing the Web to Empower People: Challenges and Solutions from Web Foundation on Vimeo.

This video summarizes the vision of the World Wide Web Foundation and provides one example of the work we are doing in Africa to empower farmers through the Web. Many thanks to our funder and partner, VU University, Amsterdam, and our other partners in W4RA, for their support in this particular initiative.

The Web Foundation is a new international non-profit organization founded by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The mission of the Foundation is to "advance the Web to empower people".

Why a "Web Foundation"? Communication, collaboration and creativity are critical to social and economic empowerment. The Web is the most powerful means for communication, collaboration and creativity in history. However, the Web is only being used by 1/4 of the Earth's population. The continued growth and advancement of a free and open Web are not guaranteed. There is much work to be done.

The Web Foundation works to catalyze global support for the Web, build local capacity to create accessible content, and promote research that accelerates the ability for individuals and organizations to harness the Web to address major societal challenges.

In this video, the work of the Foundation is illustrated with the story of how we are working to empower farmers in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa. Through Web applications on mobile phones, community radio, ingeniously-simple agricultural techniques developed by a small number of local farmers can be quickly shared with the vast majority of farmers who need this knowledge to grow crops in arid environments.
See: Advancing the Web to Empower People: Challenges and Solutions

Using the Architecture of Disaster Capitalism

I have read that 80% of the world do not have access to the Web. ) The Web has been largely designed by the developed world for the developed world. But it must be much more inclusive in order to be of greater value to us all.

Tim Berners-Lee Speech before Knight Foundation-14 September 2008

There is always this patience factor that we could build in any system. What we may see in the introduction to transforming society must be a slow growth and careful process. But, if we were to institute large changes, then how could we do it without stirring the "public pot" and introducing large scale reformations for what we thought most apropos for these societies and the principals with which we shall imbue this change. "Elect new governments" who bring this to bear as a platform to our cities and small towns across the globe.

The crisis on Wall Street? Not much time now before the changes are made under the principals of the "banking system" under the bailout initiative.

It was important to me to understand how "paradigmatic changes" were sitting at the heart of these initiatives." How capitalism can rear it's head to employ such tactics, for those same changes "filtered down to a public."

Politically enshrined capitalism, had become distant too, from the heart of the society with which it seeks to govern. The negotiation features of the elite were signs of a time intrade when "such distance was created." This auspice of change is the idea of the WTO which is again "transforming itself" into the framework of the FTAA(Free Trade Area of the Americas). EU by example sought to create a strength, and brings purpose under this initiative?

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) (Spanish: Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA), French: Zone de libre-échange des Amériques (ZLÉA), Portuguese: Área de Livre Comércio das Américas (ALCA), Dutch: Vrijhandelszone van de Amerika's) was a proposed agreement to eliminate or reduce the trade barriers among all countries in the Americas. In the latest round of negotiations, trade ministers from 34 nations met in Miami, Florida, United States, in November 2003 to discuss the proposal.[1] The proposed agreement was an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States. Against the market are positioned Cuba, Venezuela and later Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Nicaragua and Honduras, which entered the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in response, and not strongly opposing but not supporting Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

So we are all the wiser now, of institutional changes that can be brought into the society. Have you seen "this feature before?" Look to our governments and the rules of governance? Sure countries have been overthrown , but this is not what we seek here. We seek to bring equality to every facet of the world's populations that we might all share in the prosperity of knowledge that can help us bring change to our current situations in a "peaceful and intentional way."

A few years ago I chatted with a woman involved in relief work in war-ravaged areas. I wondered aloud whether Internet access should be low on the priority list after clean water, and other critical resources. She responded by telling me the story of a young man who had taught himself English, and with a connection to the Internet, how he set up his own translation business. This business provided income for the village as well as opening up new communications opportunities. I learned that I should not prioritize for others. Instead, I should listen to their concerns and opportunities and then do what I can to help.Tim Berners-Lee Speech before Knight Foundation

20% of the Population only Aware?

Well the transformation process then begins. It is to recognize that the potential exists for an advancement for business to bring information to the greater population, then, to what has already existed.

It is here that the idea of an humanitarian effort seeks to include the rest of our societies in education freely gathered. Open access to education. That we would seek our governments to ensure that "access to information" would be part of the initiatives to bring small town prosperity, in terms of knowledge, to all who seek to advance and be transformed by their personal ideology and freedoms. To seek from, and develop, the platforms that are implemented in a "open and free society" which seeks to invent, and be creative. One that does not discriminate between the rich and the poor. Gender, or the colour of ones skin. To participate in the advancing of views of alls it people "globally" regardless of which country you come from.


Where the Architecture comes in.

A shift in paradigm can lead, via the theory-dependence of observation, to a difference in one's experiences of things and thus to a change in one's phenomenal world.

ON Thomas Kuhn

How many of us are quite liberal to understand that "crisis" brings about change? In the case of "ole institutions" falling away like Wall Street, to see it become something much more in terms of the access to investment and the way we trade? That contractor development(mercennaries) in the face of war has brought new business to bear instead of countries who are out to provide peace keepers. Instead of an offensive fighting force that governments can distant themself under reconstruction.

But lets move on here to consider the ramification of "Revolution for change." The understanding of how the implication of capitalism could change under the auspice of "this seeking" to bring the humanitarian effort to freedom and access to information that the rest of that 80% of the global society may be included?

Who are in control of your access to the internet?

I am advocating an access and freedom to information which may alter the course of these businesses/governments, intranet creation , which can allow access to the internet. I am also "guessing" that the telecommunications would be changed in that assess to conversation has now been preceded by a communication that can happen in real time through such a high speed internet access. Many of us played with this feature before is would a new business on the internet.

Such historical developments, in terms of the Internet as to profiteering has sought to compartmentalize, to gain access to money creation and wealth. Who controls the Internet?

Earlier, I posted on the idea of "the Library" as a universal implement(hot zone) whereby all people can gain access to information. That like the laptop-book, becomes a source of information to develop further, what we are doing in the real world. This would be moving slowly, while we know this exists now and is a security infraction to those who do not guard their own access to the internet.

Product development currently in existence would bring about potentials greater then currently are being expressed by the 20% of the population. If given to the ability of advertising, would see it's product manufacture base, if it were already sitting at the precipice of this change, access to a greater market?

But again I have gone to far here.

It was only to demonstrate what might be recognized, if for instance, we saw a health care system, and the businesses that provide the insurance under employer/employee negotiated settlements, recognize, that as a cost to providing this benefit to it employees, it is much cheaper in a country like Canada for providing that benefit. It serves to help business recognize what profiteering seeks to do by implementing a "for profit health care system."

It demonstrates that as "two tier system" those that have money, and those that don't, have preferential treatment to moving ahead of those who have the same needs at the same time.