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At the OSCON Open Source Convention this morning, David Recordan officially announced the Open Web Foundation, the meta-standards organization mentioned briefly yesterday during the Facebook F8 conference.

Recordan told me that the OWF’s mission is to bring a legal framework, consistency, and communication to the various existing Web standards efforts now underway. As he notes, projects like OAuth and OpenID are similar but being run separately. OWF will provide frameworks that existing and new projects can work within, and try to secure agreements that will keep standards groups from taking legal action against each other.

The goal is admirable and there are plenty of people with strong experience in creating standards that are behind this effort. But I asked Recordan if OWF was just another layer of bureaucracy, and would thus slow down standards making. He said it’s a danger, but obviously he feels that assurances of freedom from legal action would make working with the OWF worth the effort.

Facebook, clearly, is supporting the effort. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace have also pledged support. The list of individuals and companies backing the project is on this OWF page.

Here’s Recordan’s slide deck from his OSCON talk:

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A video interview with Recordan will be added here shortly.

Here is the original:
Open Web Foundation aims to keep standards groups from suing each other