About

I’m a web stan­dards and elec­tronic gov­ern­ment con­sul­tant from The Nether­lands. I work for ICTU, the cen­tral Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy orga­ni­za­tion for the Dutch gov­erne­ment. HerkoCoomans.net has been esab­lished in 1996, and has been my sand­box for my main addic­tion: the world wide web. I’m pas­sion­ate about web stan­dards, seman­tic web, social net­works, prac­ti­cal knowl­edge man­age­ment, and of course my beau­ti­ful wife and our two hor­ri­ble mon­sters cats.

We are work­ing on an open, world­wide web that empow­ers every­one to par­tic­i­pate in social, eco­nom­i­cal and demo­c­ra­tic processes, and be able to express our­selves therein.

The inter­net, and the world wide web espe­cially, has in a short time grown into the veins that trans­port the blood of our infor­ma­tion soci­ety. Every aspect of our lives is con­nected to the net­work. An open web enables every­one to con­nect with other peo­ple. And do busi­ness with com­pa­nies any­where on the planet. And to demo­c­ra­t­i­cally influ­ence (the orga­ni­za­tion of) the col­lec­tive. In that traf­fic the exchange of infor­ma­tion is essen­tial. For that, we need robus, sus­tain­able and intel­li­gent stan­dards. Thus, web stan­dards enable change and progress.

I’m also the Sec­re­tary of the Board of the Child Sup­port Ghana and Wa Yiri Children’s Home Ghana foun­da­tions. Both organ­za­tions sup­port a num­ber of med­ical, edu­ca­tional and devel­op­ment projects in Wa, cap­i­tal of the Upper West Region in Ghana, West Africa.

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