OneWebDay

May 9th, Tuesday evening, is the Boston Brainstorming Party. We’ll meet at 7pm at John Harvard’s Brew Pub, 33 Dunster St. We’re planning on a substantial turnout, so don’t disappoint us.

Come prepared to ask this question of the guy drinking a beer next to you: “So, what are YOU doing for OneWebDay?”

Be ready with your own answer. Maybe you’ve got a new online business you want to show off and connect to OneWebDay. Maybe you’ve been helping people in a developing country get online, and you want to tell your story. Maybe you’ve made a new connection with a distant family relative. Whatever it is, it’s a story that has something to do with how the web has changed your life.

See you in Boston! Wiki signups are here.

We heard a great idea today — make it easier to suggest OneWebDay projects and get them on the wiki without actually asking people to go in and edit the wiki. Editing wikis can be hard the first few times.

We’re working on it. It would help to have a link to a web form that’s easy to fill out. Then you submit the form and bloop! the project is on the wiki, on the right page (maybe a country page, or an organization page).

Thanks for the ideas — keep them coming.

Details for Boston (May 9) and Chicago (May 11) are here. Please sign up — the idea is to talk about OneWebDay projects and brainstorm about new OneWebDay ideas.

Still in the works: Los Angeles and Austin — dates and locations TBD.

The goal of OneWebDay is to make the web more visible to more people. As we go around the world to talk to people about OneWebDay, we hear a lot of good ideas about how to do this.

But we really hadn’t thought of the Guinness Book of World Records approach. Here’s the idea: invent new categories of online records for creative collaboration, and then break them!

E.g., number of bloggers posting for the very first time during a single minute. Number of grade schools posting pictures for grandparents to look at during a single day. Number of rhyming poems created collaboratively, online, within a single afternoon. Number of virtual beach balls bounced without being virtually “dropped.”

Keep it up — it’s just five months away. What are you doing for OneWebDay?

We had a really great OneWebDay brainstorming session last night in London. Lots of ideas, lots of enthusiasm, and a multitude of plans. It will be embarrassing not to be part of OneWebDay in the U.K.!

London is one of the most connected cities in the world, and the plan is to create a host of Guiness Book of World Record online feats (e.g., “most simultaneously blogging friends over 75 in one room”) and then break them.

Today the OneWebDay caravan is in Helsinki, where it’s raining hard. We’re hoping for another enthusiastic OneWebDay takeup moment. More tomorrow.

Next world stop for OneWebDay planning purposes: London.

We’ll be having a reception/brainstorming session on Wednesday, April 19 from 5-7 pm.

Location: Room U, Portcullis House, London, SW1A 2LW

Do come if you can — let us know at volunteer@onewebday.org if you can make it.

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.

OneWebDay discussion in Portland, OR — details here.

Four OneWebDay events coming up in the near future, now that we’ve caught our breath after the New Zealand meeting. We’ll add all four to the wiki once the details are straight:

1. Portland, Oregon. Dinner on Saturday, April 8. Place and time to be announced right here as soon as we know them.

2. London, England. Cocktails on Wednesday, April 19, 5-7pm, Room U, Portcullis House.

3. Boston, Mass. Drinks/dinner on Tuesday, May 9, John Harvard’s Brew House, Harvard Square.

4. Chicago, Ill. Drinks/dinner on Thursday, May 11, place and time to be announced right here as soon as we know them.

Still being planned — Austin, TX.

A key project for OneWebDay is going to be making it easy for people to post tribute pages about their friends and relations. The web is about people and connections, and having tributes easily available (and easy to skim through) seems to us like a natural step for OneWebDay.

We should have the tribute template up in the next week or so, and we’ll link to it from the OneWebDay wiki.

Looking forward to Sept. 22!