The OpenJS Foundation is a new initiative by the Linux Foundation that came about as a merger of the Node.js Foundation and the JS Foundation. During her keynote address at the Open Source Summit Europe 2019, Robin Bender Ginn, its incoming Executive Director says the intention is for the OpenJS Foundation (opens in new tab) to become the open and neutral home for the JavaScript community.
JavaScript, love it or hate it, is ubiquitous on the web and it's used by 95% of all websites (opens in new tab) on the Internet: “How do you take this technology and keep it trustworthy and keep it modern with an astronomical user base? It’s a humbling responsibility.”
The OpenJS Foundation currently hosts over 30 JavaScript projects including some of the most popular ones like Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, webpack, and is working to bring in more, even reaching beyond its member organisations. Robin’s been a Node.js advocate for several years and co-founded the OpenAtMicrosoft (opens in new tab) initiative during her previous stint at Microsoft. Besides her, she tells us, many of the OpenJS Foundation’s board and council members have been involved with either the Node.js or the JS foundations for many years.
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She had only been at the job for a month when we caught up with her in Lyon, and during that time the foundation welcomed their first two incubation projects in the form of the Node Version Manager (opens in new tab) and Google’s AMP project (opens in new tab).
OpenJS Certification program
Besides these two, the one project that Robin is very excited about is the OpenJS Certification program (opens in new tab), which was announced during her keynote. Robin tells us that the certification had been in high demand from the community for some time now and in true open source fashion, it was the community that helped shape the certification through extensive discussions on GitHub.
Talking about her near-term To-Do, Robin who has a background in journalism, tells us that she has a set of questions that she’d been asking the project leaders and people in the community, to identify trends. She talked about this in her keynote as well when she mentioned that the number one priority for the OpenJS Foundation is to grow in order to do more and create more programs.
In more tangible terms, Robin says her immediate priority is to “bring on new members and also bring on new projects to help them grow and further their success.”
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