Today at the Southbank Centre in London, the inventor of the World Wide Web and founder of the Web Foundation, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, helped to unveil plans for a major festival dedicated to the future of the Web. Entitled the Web We Want Festival, this major cross-platform arts event will run for eight months, starting in September 2014. This Southbank Centre festival will spearhead the UK arts community contribution to the global Web We Want campaign, which has been launched in 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Web.
At today’s launch, Sir Tim was joined on stage by Jude Kelly, artistic director of the Southbank Centre. Jude and Tim discussed and debated the future of the Web with an audience of artists, thinkers, makers, media and youth representatives.
Sir Tim said:
“The future of the Web depends on ordinary people discussing it, taking responsibility for it and challenging those who seek to control the Web for their own purposes. The first step is to answer one simple question: what kind of Web do we want? Southbank Centre’s festival will make an important contribution to building – from the ground up – a global, participatory movement where ordinary people can discuss, debate, and have their say. It is vitally important to me and our work at the World Wide Web Foundation that we empower people from all walks of life to shape the future of the Web.”
More information on the Festival is available on the Southbank Centre website and a full press release is here: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/sites/default/files/press_releases/webwewantfest_press_release2014.pdf
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and learners at today’s launch. Photo Credit: Belinda Lawley
Janene Sproul
May 12, 2014
Thank you for your initiatives for people with disabilities. As an advocate for students working with photosensitivity, the Web Accessibility Initiative is timely. The web has allowed access to many new experiences from within the classroom, and lowering the risk of adverse reactions from students makes it even more student-friendly.ThanksJanene
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john dsouza
June 9, 2014
We have awaiting methods to aggregate disparate data, which Sir Lee had promised in a TED lecture.NGOs who have been working for alternative development in our country are being targetted as having been responsible for reducing our GNP by two to three percent by opposing environmentally destructive and programmes that impact commons and community controlled livelihoods. We are looking for programmes that will help us aggregate the growth of the alternative or what we call real development, which does not get captured by the GDP logic. Therefore instead of crawling government websites, we want to enable & motivate NGOs to be able to post their data, so that these alternatives can be visualised.
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José M. Alonso
June 14, 2014
@john We hear you. Wf has been working on launching a global program to equip NGOs with the needed capacities to become more efficient in using and sharing data. As part of this effort, we have just launched an open data lab in Jakarta. You can read more about it at: http://webf2.wpengine.com/projects/open-data-lab/
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