On November 14, 2012, Tim Berners Lee came to celebrate 20 years of the Web in Rome and we made him find a two-meter-high cake. At least: I remembered it like this, but now I went to the Facebook page of the event, which is still there, and I found the photo of that moment, that of the candles. The cake wasn’t that tall, but it was beautiful.
The initiative was wonderful. We called her Happy Birthday Web, choosing one of the many possible www birthdays: the day Tim Berners Lee told his supervisor he had an idea? When did you make it with Robert Caillau? When did they introduce her to the world, changing it forever? I don’t remember which anniversary we chose to invite him, it was clearly a pretext to celebrate something important in a country that, for the most part, had not yet understood the meaning of the digital revolution. I had recently left the management of Wired and the Rome Chamber of Commerce had asked me to cure a series of events to make the “culture of innovation” grow in the city; I remember it because it is from this collaboration that the Maker Faire was born two years later and is still held every year.
We started with the Web, at the Temple of Hadrian, in front of Montecitorio, and it was a beautiful party (here a video with some guests): I remember in particular the passionate and enlightened speech by Stefano Rodotà, who is no longer there; but that day on stage many valuable people took turns with many of whom a friendship was born. There was in our words an enthusiasm which time will reveal the naivety: for example I had invited two girls, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who did not know us, to demonstrate that through the Net it was possible to confront, understand each other and, as we have said many times, demolish walls and build bridges.
I still think that this is the true sense of Tim Berners Lee’s World Wide Web and believe that if things didn’t turn out as we hoped it has depended on others, who have bent the Net to a logic of exclusive profit, and that we still have time for a third better time than the current one.
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