The Next New Thing
 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web |
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for inventing the World Wide Web (now known as just www.whatever), gave the keynote at the Knight Foundations’s Newseum shindig tonight for all its trustees and for its grantees from the Washington area (which included the Merrill College, of course).
But the real news? That Berners-Lee is starting something called the World Wide Web Foundation and Knight just gave him $5 million to get it going.
What is the Foundation? It’s Berners-Lee and others trying to again bring “humanity to humanity”–his initiative to start a platform for people, especially from developing and emerging countries, to figure out how information services can improve their lives.
Information matters to everyone, and Berners-Lee–and Knight–want to help people make connections. As Sarah Corbett has reported in the NY Times magazine: “as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing.” And Al Hammond, the author of an economic study on how poor people in developing countries spend their money, notes: “It’s really quite striking. What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.” 
If you build a platform, Berners-Lee has found, people find all kinds of innovative ways to stand on it. What’s to come? He doesn’t know…but he wants to tap into students and other young people and have them help him figure out what should be next.