Dom Joly celebrates the work of Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee

The BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, is celebrating ECS Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, in a high-profile campaign on Information Pioneers.

Each of the five Information Pioneers in the campaign – Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Sir Clive Sinclair, Hedy Lamarr and Professor Berners-Lee - has their work presented by a celebrity advocate, in a series of short films commissioned from the distinguished director Lewis Georgeson.

In a lively and informative film, Dom Joly explains the genius and inspiration of Professor Berners-Lee in creating the Web and making it free for everyone.

Describing the circumstances that led to Professor Berners-Lee creating the Web and his determination that it should be for the world to benefit from, Dom Joly comments: “There was no central mainframe, no giant bureaucracy, no corporate HQ, no-one was going to control the Web. It wasn’t a physical thing to be owned; it was a space for everyone.

“Passionately believing that contributions to the Web mustn’t be at the mercy of financial barriers or hierarchies, Berners-Lee gave his ideas over to everyone to use - for free.”

Visitors to the Information Pioneers web site are invited to cast a vote for the pioneer they admire the most. Speaking at the launch of the campaign last week, Elizabeth Sparrow, President of the BCS, said: “We want to celebrate the achievements of these Information Pioneers and demonstrate their contribution to today’s Information Society.

“Everyone should visit the Information Pioneer campaign website and join in the debate on who should be the greatest Information Pioneer of all time, vote for their favourite pioneer and share their favourite film with their friends and colleagues.”

In concluding the film Dom Joly sums up what the Web has achieved: “With the power of his daydream from the 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee has put the world at our fingertips and we’re hardly off the starting-blocks. We’re alive during a genuine revolution, who knows what’s next for the Web? Well, we do, because its future is ours to keep creating . . .”

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a Trustee and Programme Director of the Web Science Trust, and has been a Professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science since 2006.