OneWebDay

You have to be a little bit idealistic to celebrate the internet, and idealism is out of fashion these day. But we’re working on finding ways to make idealism feel more comfortable for OneWebDay participants.

Maybe idealism is easier if it’s simple to carry out — if it doesn’t take making a big speech in front of an audience (something most people don’t like to do) but instead requires only taking a minor action (clicking to send a virtual beach ball overseas). Our hope is that you’ll suddenly see yourself as part of an online world of patterns and interactions. That’s our goal here. We want to make idealism simple, tied to something you use every day (but may take for granted), and result in something visually arresting and worthwhile.

Easy.

We’re working away here at OneWebDay on making it possible for many people to participate in large visual online projects to celebrate OneWebDay. There’s a photography exhibit that gave us some ideas — it’s called The Earth From Above, and it’s just beautiful.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand has taken pictures of the earth that show the patterns that emerge from human and natural activities — like logs floating in rivers, people gathering in squares, birds flying across mountains. The photos are often mounted outdoors – there’s an exhibit of them in Wellington, New Zealand right now along the waterfront.

The dream of OneWebDay is to show these kind of human-generated patterns online, in all their beauty, so that everyone can see them. Bouncing a big beachball across continents, using our 0wn laptops, is a kind of pattern — and it would also be fun to generate.

Tomorrow is the day six months before OneWebDay. It’s the polar day!

It will be good to celebrate the internet. It’s done a lot for us.

In just a few days, we’ll be having a OneWebDay meeting at the Thursday Night Curry gathering in Wellington, New Zealand. Should we bring the banner from New York? Or is that a little silly?

We’ll bring the banner. OneWebDay is all about energy, enthusiasm, and individual participation. If a banner can help get some Kiwis involved, the banner will be there.

We’re getting a lot of visitors, and the first post has disappeared down the page a few times, 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, 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 OneWebDay is to make it obvious that the Web is not all spam, viruses, dark corners, and predatory actors. Good things are happening online, and for whatever reasons they don’t get noticed — routinely.

Optimism isn’t fashionable these days, and online optimism often gets labeled as hype. We at OneWebDay embrace the hype — hype is hope! The Web gives us enormous opportunities for collaboration and creativity. And cool stuff. For example, here’s a video about an elaborate and fascinating online game. (It’s worth watching, but it takes about half an hour, so be warned.) If you weren’t at the conference where this video was made, you’d never know what Will Wright said — unless you used the Web, saw the video, and thought, Boy, that looks great! Maybe this is trivial, but we think it’s transformative.

And newsworthy.

Along with the virtual beachball idea, one of the things we’ve always wanted for OneWebDay was a light-filled geographic visualization of the web — so that people could see how they’re connected.

This could be done as a Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps mashup: pinpoint your location – eg zip code — and see your zip code colored in on the map – how quickly can we color in the world? We could have a zip code area move from lighter to darker as more people in that zip code send in their clicks on OneWebDay. We could have prizes for areas/universities/schools with the most logins.

Yes, bots would be interested too — but we shouldn’t let that stop us. Send us ideas for illuminating our collective connection!

It’s been a great evening of brainstorming about OneWebDay in New York City. Some ideas:

A virtual beachball game — have people clicking around the world to collectively send a ball bouncing from continent to continent.

Make it easy for people to create “great things I found online today” entries (collective visual museums).

Make it easy to teach people how to edit wikis, create tags, etc.

Don’t have all of these activities be so high-bandwidth — the all-text digital storytelling project, for example, could allow text mashups that don’t take forever to download.

Have just two or three great, simple projects that are easy to find and notice. For this first year, it’s most important to have the message (celebrate!) clear. More can happen next year.

Thanks to everyone for coming — we here at OneWebDay noted a zillion ideas. The next step will be to open up this blog so that each entry can be a project-in-progress — we can use the comments fields to keep working on projects. And then get things on the wiki for volunteers to run.

The OneWebDay train is gathering steam. There was a fine planning dinner last night in San Francisco, with a zillion great ideas coming up. First: no more silly hand signal. Forget the hand signal! We’re talking about the Web here, and the Web doesn’t need a hand signal. Phew – now that we have that out of the way, how about these ideas:

Let’s create really simple tutorials that teach people how to, say, edit a wiki. Or how to tag something (and what that means). Chris Heuer has thoughts about how we could combine a discovery database (who’s willing to teach in what coffee shop) plus a downloadable package with signage and guidelines about how to teach the skill in question. Then the tutor puts up his/her little sign in the coffee shop and we’re off! The student will be teaching other people before the day is through.

There were many thoughts about possible celebrity OneWebDay adherents. Send us your thoughts!

Let’s find corporate sponsors who are interested in helping assisted living/nursing homes have better web access.

It’s clear that we have to leverage existing resources rather than creating new OneWebDay technology. That said, it’s time to get those polar projects going, so that Sept. 22 is a culmination — not just a beginning.

OneWebDay is about personal connections to the Web and to other people, and the dinner was a joy. We at OneWebDay were so deeply impressed by the generosity of everyone who came and contributed their thoughts and plans.

We talked about the message — a lot. OneWebDay is a big tent, that’s clear. Any project that celebrates and makes use of and contributes to the web is a OneWebDay project.

Next: New York City! March 14, starting at 7:00 p.m. Event is at Union Bar (204 Park Ave. South, between 17th and 18th); more details here are at the New York Brainstorming Event page. There’s also an Upcoming.org event page here.

On Flickr, you’ll see some pictures of the 7′x3′ banner that made its debut at dinner last night. It’s coming soon to towns all over the place.

To the people who ask “why would you celebrate the web? It’s just a tool. What are you going to celebrate next, a freeway?” we at OneWebDay have this answer:

We think the Web is much more than a tool, and we don’t think it should be taken for granted. We think it makes new kinds of human collaboration (not just shopping, not just watching movies) possible, and we think the world is still at the very beginning of the Web’s history. We think of OneWebDay as a chance to remember the impact of the Web on lives around the world, and to make the Web more visible. Its health and diversity is crucial for human flourishing in the future, just like good air quality and environmental diversity are crucial.

The Web has changed more than a billion lives already. Soon it will be changing more. It’s the very first communications network whose hardware isn’t inextricably intertwined with its software; it’s the first communications network that is more like an ecology than a way to efficiently move train cars from point A to point B. It’s the most important technological phenomenon of our lifetimes, and we want to make sure that it continues to grow and change in unpredictable ways.

The Web makes it possible for a billion people around the world to, acting separately, create sources of value that are more than the sum of their parts. Very simple actions online create patterns that are complex and fascinating, and we’re planning that OneWebDay projects will allow people to do very simple things that will result in beautiful creative collaborative online “events.” We see OneWebDay as a “big tent” kind of celebration — it doesn’t have any particular political angle. It’s just a celebration.

We think the Web is transformative and important and shouldn’t be taken for granted. So that’s why we’re celebrating OneWebDay on September 22.