Founded Early 2009 Website www.webfoundation.org | Founder Tim Berners-Lee | |
 | ||
Headquarters Washington, D.C., United States Key people Tim Berners-Lee (founder)
Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss (Board Chair)
Anne Jellema (CEO) | ||
The World Wide Web Foundation (also Web Foundation) is an organization dedicated to the improvement and availability of the World Wide Web. The formation of the organization was announced on September 14, 2008 by Tim Berners-Lee at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.. The organization launched on November 15, 2009. One of its former board members is former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The mission of the organization is "to establish the open Web as a global public good and a basic right, ensuring that everyone can access and use it freely". The foundation works in two areas, A free and open Web and Open Democracy, to reach the objectives of the organization.
It publishes the Web Index with statistics for 86 selected countries.
This organization is not related to the Open Web Foundation.
Reception
When announcing the foundation, Berners-Lee discussed a system to label websites for their trustworthiness. According to the BBC he said "there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources." The New Scientist criticized the formation of an organization to tell others what is true or not.