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weaving the web

The Web scene was beginning to fill with a colorful mix of different types of people, organizations, and concerns. The consortium would, too. It would be its own web, and sustain the greater Web, which would help sustain the web of life.

I wanted the consortium to run on an open process like the IETF's, but one that was quicker and more efficient, because we would have to move fast. I also wanted an atmosphere that would allow individuals, representing their companies or organizations, to voice their personal ideas and find ways to reach common understanding. There would always be people who would disagree, and they would be levers for progress. We would get ever closer to true consensus, perhaps never completely achieving it, but delighting in every advance.

This freewheeling design might create tension between my being a manager and leaving the consortium as a very flat space of peer respect and joint decision-making. It might create tension among consortium members, who would have to take leads on issues but always hew to a democratic process. It struck me that these tensions would make the consortium a proving ground for the relative merits of weblike and treelike societal structures. I was eager to start the experiment.

The WWW conferences continued half-yearly at Darmstadt, Boston, and Paris, and the academic institutes hosting them founded the International World Wide Web Conference Committee as a nonprofit organization, to continue the series, with Robert as president. On the business side, Netscape was working furiously to release the first commercial version of its browser by the end of the year. Bill Gates and Microsoft, who had shrugged off the Internet and the Web, were realizing they might be missing a good party. Gates assigned people to develop a browser. Microsoft was also investigating the development of an online service that might compete with America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy.

The timing of who was developing which technology, and who was working with whom, would determine the course of