About
About the organization
The Organization for Internet Welfare is an independent, non-commercial project with one job: to answer a plain question in plain language, on the day it is asked, for free.
What we do
We publish one assessment of the general health of the internet, on a scale of one to five, and we explain the reasoning behind it. That is the whole remit. We are not a monitoring company, a security vendor, a standards body, or a regulator, and we have no authority over anything.
The question "is the internet on fire?" gets asked by ordinary people a few hundred thousand times a year, usually in a panic, and the honest answer is almost always no. Someone should say so out loud and keep saying it.
What we are, stated plainly
We are a small volunteer project, run not for profit in the ordinary sense of the phrase. Nobody draws a salary from it and there is nothing here to buy. We want to be precise about that rather than impressive: we are not a registered charity, we hold no tax-exempt status, we are not incorporated as a foundation, and we do not ask for or accept donations.
If that sounds like a small thing to put on an organization's about page, consider how many sites that look like this one are quietly selling something.
How this is paid for
A domain and a few dollars a month of hosting, out of the founder's own pocket. There are no sponsors, no advertising, no affiliate links, no premium tier, and no newsletter trying to become a business. Nobody has any commercial reason to want the number on the front page to be higher than it is, which is the only funding model that makes this page trustworthy.
Who writes the assessments
People who have spent their working lives running websites and infrastructure, reading the same public sources anyone can read. We publish the method instead of the credentials, because the method is the part you can check.
We keep the authorship quiet on purpose. The assessment should stand on its reasoning, and a name on it adds nothing you can verify.
What we will never do
- Sell anything, recommend a product, or take money from anyone who does.
- Raise the level for attention, and we will not pretend to certainty we do not have.
- Run advertising or trackers on this site, or build a profile of who reads it.
- Claim a legal status, a registration, or an endorsement that we do not hold.
Using our work
Quote the assessment freely, with or without credit, in anything from a news story to a group chat. The machine readable version at /api/status.json is there for dashboards and scripts and needs no key. If you are writing about us, our method is the page to read first.