Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
Tim Berners-Lee THIS IS FOR EVERYONE
The Sheldonian Theatre Broad Street Oxford OX1 3AZ United Kingdom
Details
This Is For Everyone
The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything – transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.
In this intimate memoir, Berners-Lee tells the story of his iconic invention, exploring how it launched a new era of creativity and collaboration, while unleashing a commercial race that today imperils democracies and polarizes public debate. Filled with his characteristic optimism, technical insight and wry humour, this is a book about the power of technology – both to fuel our worst instincts and to profoundly shape our lives for the better.
As the rapid development of artificial intelligence heralds a new era of innovation, Berners-Lee is the perfect guide to the crucial decisions ahead – and provides a gripping, in-the-room account of the rise of the online world. Peppered with rich anecdotes and amusing reflections, This is For Everyone is an essential read for understanding our times, and a bold manifesto for advancing humanity's future.
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. He studied physics at the University of Oxford before working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva.
While at CERN, he wrote a program for storing information including using random associations that he named ‘Enquire’. While never published, Enquire became Sir Tim’s conceptual basis for marrying hypertext with the internet to create a system for sharing and distributing information globally. He published this proposal in a paper titled ‘Information Management: A Proposal’ in 1989. This was the World Wide Web (WWW).
Sir Tim has been a tireless advocate for shared standards, open web access for all and the empowerment of individuals on the web. He founded the World Web Consortium (W3C), the global web standards body, where he remains Emeritus Director. He is also the co-founder of the Open Data Institute and World Wide Web Foundation. As co-founder/CTO of Inrupt he has developed the Solid Protocol, pioneering open-source technology to provide data sovereignty for citizens, governments and companies.
Sir Tim is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Oxford, and has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and awards, including the Seoul Peace Prize and the Turing Prize widely recognised as akin to the Nobel Prize for Computing. He was knighted in 2004 and later appointed to the Order of Merit by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.