The Open Web Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa).
The Open Web Foundation was founded to help developer communities collaborate and share technical innovation on the web, bringing to the world of formats and protocols the same successful grassroots approaches established by the open source community. Modeled after the Apache Software Foundation and Creative Commons, the Open Web Foundation seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of specifications with legal agreements that make such work simple, safe, and sustainable.
This reusable agreement is designed to be easily adopted by a wide range of specification communities and organizations as an alternative to the challenging -- and costly -- process of negotiating new licensing agreements every time. Specifications made available under the Open Web Foundation Agreement may include everything from small ad-hoc formats sketched out among friends to large multi-corporation collaborations that ultimately grow into international recognized standards with the help of formal standards setting organizations.
The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. To use the Agreement with your own specification, please see our guide.
We are further pleased to announce that the following companies have committed to apply the OWFa to the following community and proprietary specifications:
The Open Web Foundation Agreement is just the first step among many toward a comprehensive, straightforward approach to an open specification development process. In upcoming months, the Open Web Foundation will be developing reusable Contributor License Agreements, which can be adopted by specification communities during the development phase itself, even before a usable specification is completed, and will offer Best Practices guidelines for open development processes.
The Open Web Foundation is open to everyone without charge and we actively solicit feedback and participation from the community at large, whether or not they are Open Web Foundation members. The Legal Affairs Committee is open for self-nominations for participation in the drafting and review process itself, and interested individuals are encouraged to join the Open Web Foundation general discussion list to offer input and support.
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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.
Ready? Go! (And please let us know if you have any questions.)
Update: Our initial membership drive is over, but stay tuned as we'll be adding new members over time.
(Thanks Nate DiNiro in helping write this post!)
]]>For those who couldn't be there, here is the presentation: