disclaimer: this is a very sloppy summary of the keynote speech of Sir Tim Berners Lee. It is neither spellchecked it was taking as notes while sitting inside. I hope I find the time after www2012 to go over it and improve it.

take aways

Decentralized design that is very important. and if you talk about the centralized system like DNS vs internet there are really social issiues that you are talking about.
look at the way w3c builds standards it is hard. It is a huge organizsation and they have to work together but also be split into modular groups.

IDEA 1 Mobile web apps

he gave a lot of interesting insights about the freedom of programmers and the limits of programing models. (Closely related to my thoughts on query languages for graph data bases) He says the easier the programming model the more you restrict people the more they can achieve.
But he also points out there is an ongoing battle between being universal and just being a tool like a refrigerator. he didn’t say it directly but if you listented carefully to him he says don’t support closed blocked systems like apple or even android but make it a open html5 javascript webapp. You decide weather the web stays open. I think he really sees how the mobile web is beeing more and more closed.
He warns: Make open mobile web apps. Join the working groups for setting the standards…
takeaway: VERY VERY important and interesting part of his speech! especially for typology.
My Question: “As a company building something. if it is open you don’t get as much benefit (like access to the friendship graph) as in the case of going for android / iphone systems…”

IDEA2 Standards centralized vs decentralized – power

He talked about the importance of having the same standards for the low level like html, http, and so on. He compares this to people not speeaking the same language. He says it is cool to build all the cool stuff ontop of it.
He says it is hard to build the standards but also important because it made it possible for the web to scale and win against goopher and other things from the early web.
he says the standards are great because anyone can build something on it. it contributes to be decentralized. You don’t have to ask anyone to build something.
My Question: “SPDY seems better / faster and more mature than http. but of course it is hard to change a running system. ”
Value of being completely independend (decentralized) vs the value of working together in a common way (centralized) and this is a huge fight.

IDEA 3 Trust

Ananomous are not quite sure what they are fighing for. is it complete anarchie or fight against corruption. is it the fight against certain goverments or against goverments in general. again. central vs decentral.
Very technical part of his talk that I unfortunatly could not really follow. The main idea was clear. It was about trust, the role of social networks and the methods that could build and propagate trust.
He hopes decentralized trust systems can be found but the battle is not over. (Remark from me: Of course Google+ is better than facebook but both systems are centralized I guess there needs to be low level standards like http to olve the problem but they are hard to implement.) He already said that the semantic web people tried to do it but haven’t successed yet.

IDEA4 openess especially in UK

he talks a lot about open goverment data.
“I spend a lot of time to governments talking to governments to publish data on the web. But a lot of people are pushing back trying to hold back data an maintain power.”
he says it is your responsability to ask parties before the election to have a commitment on making government data open.
open licences. Companies complain about open licenses since they want to use it but not open up their own data.
As a member of the pirate party I can only emphisize on his statements!

Idea 5 Privacy

hes says there are three different forms of privacy:
1.) Of ourse having the shop remembering me and my shoe size is common practise and nice for me. That is one way of privacy. of course those companies if they want to have a good relation with me will not give away my data.
2.) you never know what data will be out there in the future. It might be possible that anonymous data now will become transparent through other data sets coming up in the future…
3.) invasion / tracking / sells to highest bidder / or to the goverment or whoever asks. In the first days of the web this was hard routers couldn’t do this but now it is impossible. But in my oppinion tbl was talking about the facebook’s and googles of this world.
he says this is as dynamite. If someone wants to use this data against you. you will be toasted.
And you cannot stop this. because there are institutions that collet this information and once it is collected it is not save by definition.
he basically says that you cannot collect data about users by default unless you have a similar powershare of “executive legislative and judicative” if this is not happening we should not allow anyone to make such data tracking.
We have to spend 90% time to do cool stuff on the web be innovative. but 10% of the time we have to deal with theses issues otherwise the web will be locked down at some time.
It is about blocking, spamming, twitter bombing, data stealing and so own. This is a huge challange and a big risk of our open web! It is not only the open market depending on it but also democracy and human discourse that depends on it. “I call that net neutrality”
“cispn” americans do this in trying to controll the web and close communication…. go out and look for this. This things happen quick go out and defend the internet and fight for it. This is a duty we have to do in the 10 % of our time.
“I want you to see discussing these things. Think about what you are leaving for the next generation of this. i am happy to do this in the next web conferences but I really want to see ”

questions

on distributed decission making:
How do we move from hirarchical system like our goverments are to a decentralized system which is possible due to all the connections that we have. We should be able to
people naturally don’t go out an break these boundaries of locallity. (there is also a youtube paper on this) Social networking site should rather suggest to spread friends in stead of building those communities of you have 81 friends in common. go out and meet people that are far away from you. use the connections that are being made. (what is the macroscopic effect of this little change in microscoping behaviour)
I think we should do research on new democratic systems like wikipedia (or in my opinion: pirate party) there was the story that people who didn’t vote for barack obama. It turned out those who wouldn’t vote for him didn’t because they couldn’t imagine to have a black president. There was a high correlation of those people and those who have never worked together with people from different ethnical beackground. so go out and spread friendship.
Idea: liquid feedback for W3C as a working group!
question on openess an facebook and the request on tbl’s thoughts
TBL why would you build an app on facebook or a closed world if there is still the open jungle out there. Peopole already asked my that question on netscape and internet explorer. They always ask me this if monoplies rise up.

Funny/interesing Quotes by Tim Berners Lee:

“There is only one person that has been to all web conferences and that is me”
“I recieved a mail recently saying: We had to do a project on an inventor and we decided to do it on you because you are not dead!”
“Values that made the web possible: Openess, concencious about openess, transparency, privacy,”
“If you have questions it is much more interesting for me. Because I have heard myself talking before.”
“Please develop HTML5 mobile web apps rater than native mobile apps!”