Invitation to apply for Open Web Foundation membership
Helping to spread the word!
The Open Web Foundation was conceived last year to create a framework
which helps communities behind open web specifications navigate the
non-technical organizational and legal challenges that successful
specifications are bound to encounter. Many community-driven standards
efforts falter when it comes to the heavy investment of time figuring
out how to work within our existing intellectual property laws and are
often forced to create their own non-profit organization just to
support a ten page specification.
Unlike open source software, there isn't yet the equivalent of the GPL,
BSD or Apache licenses which can be applied to specifications and
standards. The Foundation itself isn't creating the specifications,
getting involved in the technical details or blessing standards.
Instead, our goal is to "open source" the creation process itself. Just
as open source software developers shouldn't have to learn the exact
legal details of the GPL or Apache licenses, communities developing
specifications and standards for the open web shouldn't have to become
experts in copyright, trademark and patent law.
Towards this goal, we've made real progress on a new license which can
be easily applied by the authors and editors of a specification;
enforcing the core philosophy that open web specifications must be
freely implementable by anyone anywhere. The best part, we're working
with the people who went through this exact painful process for
Microformats, OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial to learn both from where
they succeeded and failed. And we're doing this so that the same thing
doesn't have to be done again and again for future specifications. You
can find an early draft of this license within our legal discussion
group.
Today, the Open Web Foundation is beginning to focus on growing our
membership so that the creation of a legitimately elected board and a
fair and transparent process may fully ensue. Embedded in this post is
our membership application, which will stay active until the end of
May. Our goal is to have an initial thirty-person membership within a
week of closing the nominations and all new membership election done by
the end of June.
While there are many different membership structures in use by
organizations all over the web, we've decided to model our membership
structure after that of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF
has done an amazing job bringing together a diverse and dedicated
community around open source software and we continue applying what has
worked for them to the Open Web Foundation.
So, here's the scoop if you're interested and we certainly want to hear
from you if you've participated in the creation of Atom, Activity
Streams, HTML 5, Microformats, Open Microblogging, OAuth, OpenSocial,
OpenID, XMPP and other communities like these:
Interested individuals need to complete the short
self-nomination questionnaire embedded below. The form includes basic
information such as past community work you've done, any memberships in
related organizations, your main area of interest and contribution, the
top two goals you'd have for the organization and names of other
community members who they have worked with. It should take less than
ten minutes to fill the form. Submissions will remain private.
The initial group of eight founding directors will review the
full list of applicants and each will mark the names of people they
would like to see as members. At this stage, there will be no votes
against applicants, just a list of the those whom they support. The
votes for each person will then be tallied and the top twenty-two
applicants will be made members. Combined with the eight directors,
this will seed the membership with an initial thirty members.
The thirty members will then continue to a second round, in
which members will vote, this time for or against, all the remaining
applicants. The votes will be confidential; who applied, how each
member voted, and the exact results. The result will be a full list of
the Open Web Foundation's membership elected through these two stages
of voting.
Once the new membership is elected, the Foundation will hold elections for a new board from among its members.
http://openwebfoundation.org/2009/05/the-open-web-foundation-is-growing-our-ranks.html
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