Open Web Foundation launched today. Anything that helps more projects survive the path from concept to adoption is fantastic. The OWF is tackling several human barriers to technical success.

• Legal barriers. Great projects have been stalled for many quarters because contributions to their work product (designs, sample code, specification, etc.) were not cleared. OWF will host projects where all contributions are cleared up front. So the final product arrives unencumbered by patents, trademarks, and other claims.

• Antisocial parents. It's not enough to reveal your great insight to the world. Throwing your newborn specification over the wall usually results in a stillborn flash in the pan. OpenWeb will help innovators foster community around their ideas. So the new product is "owned" by an open community, so it receives diverse and worldly inputs, and learns, adapts, and flourishes independent of its instigators. Ready to survive in the wild.

• Startup Governance. To incorporate or not? Where? In what form? Who holds our IP? How do we take money? OpenWeb will help with this class of problem by sharing templates for organizing and being a corporate umbrella for select projects.

Active customer service discussions in Open Web Foundation

• Can't sign in with OpenID17 minutes ago
• What about autonomo.us?about 2 hours ago
• Open in name but not in spirit?about 2 hours ago
• What are the requirements for participating as an individual?about 2 hours ago
• What is the Open Web Foundation?about 3 hours ago

Get Satisfaction support network

Implicit in all this is the shared belief that the Internet's plumbing is best served by public protocols and the culture of open source. Skype and other companies with software/web platforms may benefit from OWF's resources, peer experience, and processes to rehabilitate their developer relations programs.

Conceived in May 2008, OWF is a seed today. It needs work to build those resources. Get started by joining the Open Web Foundation discussion group. Ask questions on OpenWeb's Get Satisfaction Q&A service.

P.S. I'm spending today at the World Open Space on Open Space 2008 event with Kaliya Hamlin, who's done her bit to promote the dialog that led to OWF. Like the OWF, OSoOS is all about the human side of getting things done, specifically designing rich face to face experiences.

P.P.S. One last thought. I recently joined the first DataPortability.org Steering Group [note to self: be careful what you wish for], taking on some responsibility for achieving a data portable world ("Your Onlife, Everywhere!" TM pending). While we haven't voted on it, the sense of the Data Portability community is the Open Web Foundation is a milestone in Internet history. I expect the breadth, depth, and creativity of technology innovation to widen, deepen, and accelerate under OWF's auspices. More great ideas will survive on their merits, not die on the shoals of bureaucracy, open culture naiveté, or cash flow. The web needs this, the world needs this.

The Open Web Foundation begins today.

Congratulations to all of you who've worked to get us here. 

Now the work begins.

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Slides from David Recordon's OSCON announcement in Portland, Oregon, this morning.