Chris Messina advocates for an open Web. He works on the DiSo Project, is on the board of the OpenID Foundation, and helped create BarCamp. Last month, he joined the advisory board of Microsyntax.org.

On Friday, Messina will deliver a presentation about openness on the Social Web at Open Web Vancouver 2009. The two-day conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre begins on Thursday.

In a telephone interview from his San Francisco home, Messina spoke to the Georgia Straight about microformats, microsyntax, open government, the Semantic Web, and the open Social Web.

What was your role in the creation of microformats?

Well, I was basically a community member from very, very early on. I was involved in starting this event called BarCamp. One of the cofounders of the event, Tantek Çelik, was one of the early proponents of microformats. I worked with him sort of on the community and stuff like that. So, he kind of got me into microformats early on because I had been working with a lot of the Mozilla people, working on Firefox, and then helped to start this browser project called Flock.

To me, it seemed like Flock and microformats were like the perfect opportunity to merge very-easy-to-implement standards with sort of a browser that would actually be able to understand and make use of those things for social purposes.

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