Happy 25th birthday World Wide Web!

Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the incredibly humble Sir Tim Berners-Lee created this wonderful platform?  To celebrate, Soutbank Centre in London has a whole programe around the web and its importance.

More importantly, about why we should care about web democracy.  Now I know it sounds scary/intimidating and certainly falls under ‘eesch, sounds too techy so not for me’ but this is about much more than coding and digital.

‘This is about human rights for the web. That simple. Can’t be assumed someone is doing it’.
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Global Net Neutrality Coalition website http://thisisnetneutrality.org/

This is about ALL of us – around the world who can and do benefit from the world wide web.

Net Neutrality is for ALL of us. 

This is the second time I’ve had the honor of listening to Sir Tim Berners-Lee speak about why it’s so important that we – collectively – come together as a society to crowd-source a magna carta for everyone to follow when using the WWW.  This includes people, businesses, government, politicians and any other category I didn’t mention.  In other words, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves because we’ve proven we can’t handle it.

Think about it – we talk about equality and how the web is for everyone but then we build platforms that only run on certain machines with certain software. How is that equality? It’s not.  And we’re lucky that we have very strong advocates at Southbank’s Web We Want Festival.

The Glass Box And What It Means

Today I noticed there was something called the Glass Box. It was mentioned once or twice but I didn’t quite get what they were referring to at first (my fault, probably multi-tasking at the time).  However, during the day, I kept walking by this hub that look open, exciting, tad confusing but buzzing.

The Glass Box.

History:

• Southbank Centre are hosting Web We Want Festival which is all about the web.
• Southbank Centre’s website is, er, needing a bit (a lot) of TLC.
• The awesome people at Southbank Centre put 2 + 2 together and came up with what I consider a genius plan – use the festival to crowdsource the new website!

The Glass Box is located smack dab on the ground floor entrance and as the name implies, it’s glass = transparent.  The digital/coding team have been moved from their offices ‘upstairs’ and are working in this transparent, very open environment.

Ensuring the open data, crowd-source, transparency – Southbank is inviting you, me, us THE PUBLIC to help build their new website.  How awesome is that?!  To see the site go to digital.southbankcentre.co.uk

But it’s not just notes on a sticky note – oh no.  You’re actually also invited to come in and talk to them, test things, suggest things, even work on them should you want! Talk about taking transparent participatory to the next level!

And they don’t stop there – this project (not sure if that is right word, want to put experience), takes things one step further by also taking the time to teach with drop-in workshops to show people what they are doing and how they are doing it.

I couldn’t love this more if I tried.

And the best part of this new website?  Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first line of the code.  SERIOUSLY!  Go to http://southbankcentre.org.uk/ to see it.

Web We Want Festival is running until May 2015 – I strongly suggest everyone get involved, even just by asking questions.  I don’t have the answers but someone will – isn’t that the beauty of what the web has taught us? 

 Can’t wait to see what the rest of this festival brings! 

Additional Reading:

Southbank Centre: Digital at Southbank Centre: What does Open Web actually mean when it comes to building a new website.