The World Wide Web Foundation, also known as the Web Foundation, is a US-based international nonprofit organization advocating for a free and open web for everyone. It was cofounded by

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

, the inventor of the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

, and Rosemary Leith. Announced in September 2008 in Washington, D.C., the Web Foundation launched operations in November 2009 at the

Internet Governance Forum The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multistakeholder governance group for policy dialogue on issues of Internet governance. It brings together all stakeholders in the Internet governance debate, whether they represent governments, the priv ...

. The Web Foundation is focused on increasing global access to the World Wide Web while ensuring the web is a safe and empowering tool that people can use freely and fully to improve their lives. One of its former board members was

Gordon Brown James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British former politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Tony ...

, former

prime minister of the United Kingdom The prime minister of the United Kingdom is the head of government of the United Kingdom. The prime minister advises the sovereign on the exercise of much of the royal prerogative, chairs the Cabinet and selects its ministers. As modern p ...

Mission

The Web Foundation's mission is to advance the open web as a public good and a basic right. It seeks to achieve digital equality; a world where everyone has the same rights and opportunities online. In an open letter published in March 2018, Web Foundation founder Berners-Lee called for action to connect the 50% of the world still not online and to ensure they find a web worth connecting to. In 2019, Web Foundation launched the initiative Contract for the Web to attempt to address issues of political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations, and other malign forces on the internet.

Organization

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Web Foundation works across 70 countries, including work through partner organizations. Its team of around 30 employees works from three main hubs in

Jakarta Jakarta (; , bew, Jakarte), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta ( id, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) is the capital city, capital and list of Indonesian cities by population, largest city of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coa ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

and Washington, D.C. It is also the host organization for the

Alliance for Affordable Internet The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) is an initiative to make the Internet more affordable to people around the world. The World Wide Web Foundation serves as the Secretariat, and major members of coalition include Google, the Omidyar Netwo ...

, a global coalition of organizations working to reduce the costs of

broadband In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

and increase access to the internet.

Research

The Web Foundation produces a number of research products including the Open Data Barometer, the Affordability Report, the Web Index and other studies and reports.

Campaigning

In November 2018, the Web Foundation launched the #ForTheWeb campaign, unveiled by founder Berners-Lee at the

Web Summit Web Summit is an annual technology conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Founded in 2009 by Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly, and Daire Hickey, Web Summit was originally held in Dublin, Ireland until 2016, when it moved permanently to Lisbon. Web S ...

tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The campaign calls on governments, companies and citizens to commit to defending a free and open web by signing up to a Contract for the Web. The Contract for the Web was published as a set of initial high level principles that was built into a full contract published 25 November 2019. These principles received backing from governments including Germany and France, companies such as Google, Facebook and

Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in Sa ...

, as well as a number of civil society organizations.

References

External links