Tim Berners-Lee: doctor honoris causa

Notes from Tim Berners Lee’s investiture ceremony as doctor honoris causa, Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, October 10th, 2008.

Manuel Castells: Laudatio for Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

Quoting Tim Berners-Lee (TBL): the World can be seen as just connections, nothing else.

Net neutrality has to be maintained as one of its genuine foundations, not to create a new digital divide amongst the ones that can freely surf the Internet and those who cannot.

Timothy Berners-Lee

The Web is just a platform for people to do new things.

Lots of things that happen on the web are there just because someone else let them happen, and let people go on with their ideas… just like the Web, that in a first draft was dubbed as vage… but exciting.

Keeping one web is important, securing that computers still speak the same language, the same protocol, one to each other.

Why does the web work? Because one person puts a link, and somebody else follows it. So, understanding people is (or should be) the first step in computer science and, indeed, in designing and developing the Web of the next years. This is the aim of Web Science, to gather under the same roof computer scientists, who know about computers, and other disciplines, the ones who know about people. Web Science is about bridging the people that understand technology and people that understand people. Technology is created for the sake of Humanity, not the other way.

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If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:

Peña-López, I. (2008) “Tim Berners-Lee: doctor honoris causa” In ICTlogy, #61, October 2008. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
Retrieved month dd, yyyy from https://ictlogy.net/review/?p=1089

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7 Comments to “Tim Berners-Lee: doctor honoris causa” »

  1. Pingback: Tim Berners-Lee: Doctor Honoris Causa (act notes) | UOC UNESCO Chair

  2. thanks Ismael for sharing that.
    I liked the phrases you quoted…
    did you attend to the event? can you provide more info about the music piece, instrument and author who played at the end of TBL’s speech? that was the most elegant comment to his words.
    cheers
    m.c.

  3. Ciao Chiara

    I was just telling a friend that TBL’s speech was actually short (or shorter than I’d expected) and that the best part was not what he said but himself: it seemed to me, in the short distance, that he was a humble and honest person, human values that are even most worth mentioning them in someone of his importance.

    The instrument, the Hang, is, to say the least, an amazing instrument. You’d never say you could perform melodies with such an instrument, as it looks like a huge cow bell. An absolute discovery for most of the audience! :)

  4. Amazing!music and instrument innovative but “disruptive” as the creativity celebrated in that very day!

  5. Pingback: otro blog más — El discurso de Sir Tim Berners-Lee

  6. ¿Ya no están los vídeos disponibles?
    ¿Hay algún modo de verlos?
    Saludos y felicidades por el blog

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