The Open Web Foundation is Open for Business

David Recordon, the open platforms tech lead for blogging company Six Apart, was on hand at OSCON this morning to deliver a keynote about ways to support the "Open Web," a term that denotes a group of Web specifications developed within the open source community. Since many projects need help understanding the legalities behind adopting these specifications,  Recordon took the opportunity to announce the newly formed Open Web Foundation (OWF), "an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies."

Though in its infancy, OWF already has a wide array of individuals and companies behind it. Supporters include Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, BBC, Open Source Initiative board member Danese Cooper, Twitter's former chief architect Blaine Cook, and Creative Commons CEO .

Ajaxian founder and foundation supporter Dion Almaer says though there similar organizations -- W3C and OASIS, for instance -- the don't fill precisely the same need as Open Web Foundation. "It is a new place to look at if you come up with something helpful for the Open Web, a place that may match your values."

Chris Saad, co-founder of the DataPortability project agrees. "It seems like the foundation is well placed to provide a much needed level of oversight and legal protection for fledgling open standards. These standards will ultimately contribute to the ‘data portability’ vision of an inter-operable, standards-based web of data."

Saad notes that though the foundation's governance framework is in place, "there would be value in abstracting our governance model and providing it as a sort of ‘open source’ implementation of Roberts Rules for distributed, asynchronous groups that other global and transparent projects could use and contribute to."

Visit the Open Web Foundation Web site to see Recordon's OSCON presentation in its entirety.