Open Web (http://hblog.org/tag/the-open-web/)

“Having said all that, if I had an inch on CNN or BBC to talk about the ‘open web’, this is what I would say (based on the mapping that I’ve started here):

‘Think of a place where you and your neighbors decide what the rules are and that the only rule is that there has to be a really good reason to keep people out;
Where you’re greeted with a big welcome mat that says ‘Please come in and play’ rather than ‘Keep out until you’re invited’;
Where you can prove yourself by doing and making things and showing them to the world, rather than waiting in a line to be chosen;
Where you can talk and build with people around the world who see your difference as an asset rather than a liability;
Where the default is to share, rather than to keep hold to yourself;
And where what you read, hear and see is always an invitation to participate and create, rather than a one-way broadcast.

Around the world, people are building a new place on the web that engenders the principles of transparency, openness, sharing, collaboration and participation. The open web is a conversation about how the world can be better, and how ordinary citizens can help build it as an example for others to follow.’

- Bio: Heather Ford is a South African-born webqueen who is passionate the power of the Internet to bring people together to solve common problems.

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What is the Open Web? [Permalink]

http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/web/?permalink=What-is-the-Open-Web.html

Wed Jul 23 18:59:31 UTC 2008

Even if nobody’s exactly sure what the Open Web is the phrase can still be very useful as a buzzword. But a clearer understanding of the buzzword is a worthwhile challenge (if only so that we have something to blog about). It’s easy to point to particular principles like open standards or specific examples like APIs and mashups as examples of the Open Web. The difficulty lies in tying all these different things together into a single, coherent Big Picture. And given that the web itself is so big, bigger than any single culture or government or corporation or technology or ideology, bigger, really, than anything that has ever come before, it’s unlikely that a big enough picture exists. Any attempt to “sum up” something so huge is probably doomed to fail. But of course this is no reason not to try and do it anyways. So, let’s start thinking big.

Before the web, in the desktop era, the big visionary idea was a computer on every office desktop and in every home. We could save ourselves a lot trouble by starting with this idea. It’s a great place to start because it’s so very simple. But it’s not enough. What’s missing, of course, is the network. Not just the physical realization of the network — the wifi and the HTTP and the network protocol stacks — but also the social realization of the network in the form of other people. After all, other people are the Net’s killer app. The net nothing without that crucial ingredient. If we combine Bill Gates’ vision of universal technological empowerment with Tim Berner Lee’s vision of a world wide web something pretty cool emerges: a vision of every person and every institution communicating with every other person and every other institution through a global information system. Instead of a personal computer there’ll be a browser on every desk and in every pocket and in every device. And ‘browser’ is really just shorthand for a User Agent that can send and receive over the network.

Such a formulation isn’t perfect. There are problems that crop up when words like “every” and “global” are tossed about. But it does serve our purposes well enough; it’s plenty vague but not so vague so as to be useless. We can start here and work our way towards the various bullet-points. Of course the actual derivation is left as an exercise for the reader.

More importantly the formulation also enables us to approach some of the more problematic questions concerning the Open Web. For example it suggests that the problem with technologies like Flex/Flash and Silverlight isn’t so much that they’re proprietary but that they’re controlled by a single vendor. Is it smart to allow a single vendor to control the platform? Nope. But the answer here isn’t completely cut and dry. Technologies like Silverlight and Flex could work fine on the Open Web as long as they also work with the Open Web. So long as they integrate and work well with all the other web technologies out there (and thus don’t try to dominate the ecosystem) then there’s no reason they can’t join in. The more the merrier. Integration and control seem to be much more important than matters of proprietariness and openness. A reasonable case can certainly be made that companies should be allowed (even encouraged) to innovate and do their own thing so long as they also support standardization whenever possible. This might be the Open Web version of being a “good citizen.”

So what the heck is the Open Web? The answer turns out to be surprisingly straightforward. It’s a web that’s open to everybody and everything. This answer isn’t really satisfactory. Most answers aren’t. But it’s a start.