OneWebDay, held on September 22 every year since 2006, is a global event aimed at giving all participants in this unprecedented turn in human evolution that is the Internet a chance not only to celebrate it, but also to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining the open-networking principles that have made it the success it is.
OneWebDay 2012 will be held on Saturday 22 September 2012. The suggested theme for this year’s events is to emphasize local content as a way of making the Internet available and useful for our communities. Earlier in the year a joint report of the Internet Society, UNESCO, and the OECD – The Relationship Between Local Content, Internet Development, and Access Prices – revealed just how important local content is to building a connected society.
Mr Markus Kummer from the Internet Society stated, “This study confirms the strong relationship between local content and Internet infrastructure. Keeping the traffic local and building up local content is key for improving access to the Internet. As the volume of local content increases around the world, the Internet becomes more relevant and has a greater impact on improving the lives of local communities.”
The coming rollout of many more Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in many non-western scripts can only serve to accelerate this process.
How can you participate?
1) On September 22, celebrate OneWebDay by wishing to your friends and everyone else that we continue to enjoy the benefits of an Open Internet. Use the hashtag #OneWebDay.
2) Add the OneWebDay badge to your website/blog. Organize and participate in local events.
3) At local events, and in social media, feature local content makers, bloggers, wikipedians, webcasters, websites, etc
4) Contribute a story to the OneWebDay stories blog. Tell us what are your favorite local content sites, and why. Also, feel free to comment on other people’s stories.
And then what?
There are many avenues Internet citizens can continue, year round, to be involved in helping the Internet thrive and grow – such as:
1) The Internet Society – started in 1992 by the founders of the Internet as an organizational home to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society now has more than 100 organisational and more than 28,000 individual members in over 80 chapters around the world working to ensure best practices, policies and development.
2) At-Large – the community of individual Internet users who participate in the policy development work of ICANN. Currently, more than 100 groups represent the views of individual Internet users throughout the world, participating in building the future of the worldwide Domain Name System (DNS).