This week, Chattanooga is playing host to an extraordinary event. The WE Rock Summit and Tour (WE stands for Web Education) has attracted web industry professionals from around the world for a conversation about web design standards and, more specifically, how they are taught in classrooms.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is the official host with generous funding from the Benwood and Lyndhurst Foundations, and KCRW has had the privilege of assisting in the public relations for the summit.

Driving the discussion is the premise that job aspirants arrive at their interviews (and all too often on the job) insufficiently prepared for the web design rigor their employers will impose on them. Whether it’s the educational institutions or the employer that has failed to apply standards is immaterial; the new hire will have to be re-tooled in the employer’s mode of operation – a costly and time-consuming process.

This is a global issue, underscored by the international array of summit attendees. Their points of origin include Australia, Sweden and the UK as well as the U.S. and Canada. They represent Adobe, W3C, Opera and MailChimp, among others. But they share a common conviction that a technology as fast-moving as the Internet must have standards if it is to be all that it can be.

John Allsopp, a successful software developer and web expert, opened the WE Rock Tour – the Summit’s public forum – by noting the Intenet was “just 5,000-days-old. Think about where television was when it was 15-years-old compared to where it is today,” Allsopp added, inviting the audience to imagine how far the worldwide web has yet to go.

As technology races into the future, it simultaneously reaches backward deeper into the human experience. Allsopp reminded his audience that today’s children are “digital natives.” They are savvy and connected and the Internet is inherent and essential to their lives. Allsopp punctuated the point by reporting his two-year-old had learned to operate John’s iPhone (just before his one-year-old dropped it in the toilet).

Predicting where the web will be in 15 more years would be a fool’s errand, but wherever it is, its practitioners may regard the 2009 WE Rock Summit as a seminal event in its remarkable history.

 John Allsopp addresses the packed house at the WE Rock Tour Kickoff.