The Open Web Foundation - Community-Driven Specifications

At OSCON yesterday Dave Recordon, of Six Apart, announced a new nonprofit organization. The Open Web Foundation has been created to support the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies.

According to their website, "the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

The organization wants to see the end of developers and companies building separate foundations for specifications. Marshall Kirkpatrick says this new organization is positioning itself as complementary to the well-know Data Portability Group, a group that has been under some fire lately for being a little too "headline driven".

The foundation is designed in a similar manner as the Apache Software Foundation and will work with all vendors in the open source space such as OpenID, OAuth and OEmbed to secure Creative Commons copyrights and more.

Essentially, as Kirkpatrick says, the Open Web Foundation will be doing the actual legal dirty work of getting the technologies and specifications defined and see data portability become a reality.

Here's the presentation Dave Recordon gave:

For a list of individuals and companies supporting the new foundation, have a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on the ReadWriteWeb.

And to follow what's happening with the foundation, here's their website.

We'll do our best to keep you up to date on this new foundation and all the work they are expected to do.

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