OneWebDay

The UK event is coming together (April 19), the SF event is happening March 9, and we here at OneWebDay are working on more events in the US: Boston, Miami, Austin, Los Angeles, Portland (OR).

If you’re a denizen of one of these places, and you’d like to be an organizer or a volunteer of any stripe (why not hang a OneWebDay banner in your school?), let us know! We’d love to help get you organized. Write to us at volunteer@onewebday.org.

We’re getting a lot of visitors, and the first post as disappeared down the page, so we’re repeating it: Welcome!

This is the clearinghouse site for OneWebDay, a celebration of the internet scheduled for September 22, 2006 (and all the September 22s thereafter).

OneWebDay is one day a year when we all – everyone around the physical globe – can celebrate the Web and what it means to us as individuals, organizations, and communities.

As with Earth Day – an inspiration and model for OneWebDay – it’s up to the celebrants to decide how to celebrate. We encourage all celebrations! Collaboration, connection, creativity, freedom.

By the end of the day, the Web should be just a little bit better than it was before, and we’ll be able to see our connection to it more clearly.

OneWebDay is September 22 every year, starting in 2006.

If you write about OneWebDay or take a picture related to OneWebDay (there’s a special hand signal — you extend your middle three fingers and have your thumb and little finger touch in a circle) tag it onewebday and it will show up on this site. If you even mention OneWebDay in your blog post, it will show up here.
If you’re interested in being part of a project to celebrate the net on OneWebday, go to the ProjectWiki.

If you’d like to coordinate a project, let us know and we’ll help find people for you to work with. If you’d like to sponsor a project, by providing computing resources or money, let us know at sponsor@onewebday.org. This site is serving as a clearinghouse for projects, helping to match people to ideas (and ideas to people).

Sample projects could include:

Collective art projects (see yourself as a pixel)

Music mashups

Contributing to a slide show of flickr images of people doing the onewebday hand signal

A collection of oral histories — how the web changed my life

How I found my job online

How I found friends online

What the web means to me

How I work online

Teach your grandmother to blog

Teach the mayor to blog

Wire a town, or create a wireless hotspot

Put your digital pictures online.

Make a website for your club, church, school.

Make an entry for your neighborhood in Wikipedia.

Find out the email addresses of your neighbors and start a neighborhood mailing list.

Companies: run a virtual meeting for work-at-home employees.

Employees: teach your boss to IM.

Parents: get your kids to teach you to IM.

Doctors: Set up web-based self-scheduling for patients.

Libraries and schools: Run a website-building workshop.

About OneWebDay, Inc.
OneWebDay, Inc. is a non-profit organization. Really and truly. All donations will be devoted to making this celebration work well globally. To reach us, write to questions@onewebday.org.

The basic idea is to celebrate the internet by doing interesting and worthwhile projects online and offline that demonstrate what the web can do, and how it has changed all of our lives.

Please look around — and add to the ProjectWiki.

One of the goals of celebrating the internet is to encourage the development of great (and even free!) tools for people to use in collaborating and connecting with each other online. If you’re someone who is working on something that OneWebDay should point to, let us know at volunteer@onewebday.org!

Lions Clubs in the US are posing the following question to high school students: “The Internet: Hero or Villain?” The students are each supposed to make a 10-minute speech on the subject. We here at OneWebDay confidently expect that every single one of them says that the internet is a hero.

The web gets an awful lot of bad press. There are so many scare stories and cautionary tales. The New York Times recently ran a front-page article that said that students were frivolously emailing their teachers and wasting their time. Phooey! That’s not the true story of the internet. The internet makes education richer, more interactive, potentially more personalized — all teachers should be using wikis.

So — it’s OneWebDay-Esque to say the Internet Is A Hero! Go get ‘em.

Two in-person parties/events for OneWebDay coming up — one in SF on March 9 (go here to sign up), and one in London on April 19 (wiki page not available yet, because we’re still working on the details, but stay tuned).

We’re going to make it easy for anyone to host one of these events — they should be inexpensive and fun. We’ll have a page of “instructions” in a few days. OneWebDay: In Person!

How could we celebrate the Web using video? Can you imagine a project that might somehow show the dynamic change in the web since 1996 as a movie — and also allow us to zoom in and see our own connection at the end? A sort of “you are here now” view?

How about a promotional-spoof-type video celebrating the many new ways that people have used images artistically online? We could make fun of ourselves as well as celebrate.

How about a facility that allows random downloads of user-generated video 24/7 and projects it on a huge wall in the middle of a city? Day and night, you’d see the web, well-lit and central, part of our lives.

Now, we talk to people about OneWebDay all the time. And we get really excited when we do that, because the idea of celebrating the Web is interesting and engaging and fun.

Today, someone stopped one of us in his/her tracks, and said that having a kind of Earth Day for the Web wasn’t really necessary because it wasn’t going away any time soon.

Well, let’s think about that. Maybe it’s not going away, but maybe its diversity and health need to be celebrated so that it doesn’t fade. Maybe we need to visualize our connection to it so that we’ll be relied on to care about it into the future. Something so central to mankind shouldn’t be taken for granted.

It’s a challenge to try to figure out how to reach people who might not think of celebrating the Web. OneWebDay can’t just be an already-netizens holiday. We need mainstream media to think the Web is worth celebrating too — because it is, and their future likely lies online.

If you have ideas about how to get to people who would never think of blogging, let us know at volunteer@onewebday.org.

An important theme of OneWebDay is making the Web more visible to people. From the beginning, we’ve been talking about setting up ways for people to very easily put a visible mark on the Web and then be able to see all those marks, collectively, as a kaleidoscope of energy and movement. We’ve talked about online stadium waves, about seeing yourself as a pixel online (maybe a shard of a pixel — there are a lot of us), about creating online poems and pictures collectively, and about global online music. It has to be simple, but it also has to be beautiful and memorable. We love synchronizing, we humans, and synching up online in a creative (and of course asynchronous) way is very attractive.

Trying to let people know that the Web is a free and ordered space–both at once–is something that artistic collaborations can make clear. That’s why creative efforts are central to OneWebDay.

Think of a project that involves lots of other people all around the world doing something pretty simple that results in a remarkable, memorable site/sight (or sound) online. That’s OneWebDay.

A major focus of OneWebDay will be secondary schools. But, boy, this is a huge world of actors and organizations and people that we’d like to reach. What’s the best way to get there, and to persuade teachers to do lessons on OneWebDay that will have something to do with online collaboration and celebration?

One thought we had was to create projects that schools could easily plug into. Some years ago, some of us were involved with ThinkQuest, which is a very OneWebDay initiative. The idea behind ThinkQuest is that students from different schools create educational and innovative web sites together. The ThinkQuest library is amazing — here’s a winner from 2005, put together by fourth- and fifth-grade students in Wisconsin and Australia. Here’s the whole library of sites from the ThinkQuest competition. Isn’t that great?

We’ll be encouraging the emergence of lots of ThinkQuest-like efforts all around the world.