One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information. One aspect of these barriers is the ability for Web content to be available in all the languages of the World. For instance, The Unicode standard and HTML support characters in a large number of world languages, but many users may not have the right fonts to display those characters. Fonts for smaller language communities may not be readily available, making it hard to share knowledge in those languages.

Since we are just starting this Foundation, we are in the early phases of understanding the extent of this sort of need. But we didn't have to wait long, and we didn't have to look far. Indeed, the first case literally fell into our lap 30 minutes before announcing the Foundation. This is what i call the Web Foundation Effect !

Tim and Ian took a cab to go to the dinner, and, by chance, driving the cab was Aleme. Aleme is a taxi driver in Washington DC, but as an Ethiopian, and as a passionate about the Web, he is also, on his free time, a developer of a Web font for Amharic (Ethiopian language). He believes that the availability of such a font would allow all Ethiopians speaking only this language to exploit the potential of the Web for their purpose. What was the chance that people involved in the launch of the Web Foundation would find a potential contributor in a taxi driver ? almost zero... but it happened ! and it would not have happened a year ago, because this was clearly out of the scope of W3C.

This is a meaningful evidence that now, by investigating how, through the Foundation, we can make the Web more universal, we will find many potential contributors, many Aleme for hundreds of dialects in the World, who at their level will contribute to extend the frontier of the Web to their community.

Of course, we will follow up with Aleme, we will help him, when the foundation is up and running, to build a proposal for us, and to relate his work with other ongoing initiatives in this domain, and we will see if this is going somewhere, but i wanted to share this incredible story !

This is for me also an incredibly good illustration of how an individual actions could have an exponential effect on the accessibility and usability of the Web for people who are not able today to exploit its potential.

Stephane

Dear Friends of the Web ...

Tonight, 14 September 2008, I joined Tim Berners-Lee in Washington, DC, USA at the incredible Newseum for his announcement of the formation of the new World Wide Web Foundation. Tim's speech is online, as well as video and photos and a press release.

Many thanks to everyone who has helped get us to this first step:

  • Alberto Ibargüen and the Knight Foundation for their very generous seed grant.
  • The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Web Science Research Initiative, and the joint task force behind this project: Tim, Stéphane Boyera, Daniel Dardailler, Craig Heintzman, Rosemary Leith, Mauro Nunez and Thomas Roessler.
  • Ian Jacobs, Karl Dubost, Ted Guild and many others from the W3C systems and communications teams for building this Web site.

The promise of the Foundation is to accelerate the Web's advancement and growth around the planet. It is pretty exciting to be a part of it. We are still in the planning phase, and I expect to use this blog to share more information as we progress towards a full launch in early 2009. All those interested in becoming founding donors for this initiative are welcome to contact me at donations@webfoundation.org.

Beyond financial contributions, what about contributions of intellectual capital? It would be great to hear your ideas on how the community that is developing the Web used now by about 1/5th of the inhabitants of the planet could contribute their time and skills to bring the benefits of the Web to the other 4/5ths.

Have a look around the new site. If you have any questions or ideas, send me email at contact@webfoundation.org.