Introducing the GraphQL Foundation

Lee Byron
2 min readNov 6, 2018

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In the spring of 2012, as part of an effort to build Facebook’s next generation iOS app, Nick Schrock, Dan Schafer and myself set out to build an API for News Feed and arrived at the first version of GraphQL. We saw potential in what we had built and spent the next few years expanding GraphQL to support the majority of Facebook’s products.

Inspired by a series of other successful open source efforts from our teammates, we decided to share GraphQL with the broader community in the summer of 2015, following an intensive internal redesign. Since then, the GraphQL community has grown from hobbyists to large companies adopting GraphQL to new companies started from the ground up to build new tools and services for GraphQL. Today there are regular meetups and multiple dedicated annual developer conferences around the globe by and for the GraphQL community. Today, GraphQL has been a community project longer than it was a Facebook internal project — which calls for its next evolution.

I’m thrilled to announce the intent to form the GraphQL Foundation, in partnership with the Linux Foundation, Facebook, and nearly a dozen other companies.

Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, we hope to create a space for our community to work together to help GraphQL become a reliable industry standard by encouraging broad contributions and a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support. This is a natural progression of the work we’ve already done to support the community including hosting regular technical working group meetings, and formalizing an RFC process for improvements.

Today’s announcement is just the beginning. Over the next few months we’ll be ironing out the details, finalizing a list of founding members, establishing a governance structure, raising funds, and electing committees. If this process is something you or your company hope to participate in, sign up for our mailing list to stay connected and visit foundation.graphql.org to learn more.

I’d like to thank the Linux Foundation for their guidance and stewardship, and Facebook for their continuing support of GraphQL and the open source community. The GraphQL Foundation will ensure a stable, neutral, and sustainable future for GraphQL.

Don’t miss Linux Foundation’s press release!

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Lee Byron

I design and build software and teams at Robinhood. React, GraphQL, Immutable.js, Web, Mobile, JavaScript. Opinions are my own, often flawed.