OneWebDay

Yes, it’s the first visit of OneWebDay to Morocco. And, in fact, we’re interested in knowing who we should connect to in Marrakech. Send all suggestions to volunteer at onewebday dot org.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, 27 June
3:30 pm
Hotel Mansour Eddahbi
Marrakech, Morocco

Address:
Boulevard Mohammed V
40 000 Marrakech

We’re looking forward to it. OneWebDay In The Casbah.

Now, this site has a lot of ideas about what to do to celebrate OneWebDay online. Begin a story, post a picture, put the OneWebDay button on your site, tell your local reporter.

Here’s the core, central thing to do in this Year One of OneWebDay (and you’ll be able to say “I was there!”): Make sure a visible, interactive, entertaining event happens in your town. Yes, this is quite a responsibility. But who better than You to pull it off?

It doesn’t have to be large. If you’ve got an outdoor wireless hotspot (preferably free, preferably no log-in required, but at least free) in your town, get some friends to go there with you at an appointed time on that day. Put up a OneWebDay banner. We’ll have downloadable art for you, or you can make your own. Have a speaker come and make a speech about how the internet has changed his/her life. Have the speaker be a rock star (or other celebrity). Or maybe the speaker should be You.

Do a blog post, a series of picture posts, or any other kind of collaborative 0nline act from that hotspot on that day. Make that post/picture set/whatever visible to the crowd. Make sure the local paper knows. That’s a way to make OneWebDay visible. You own OneWebDay — we all do.

The goal of this activity is to create a global good news day for the Web. We also want to encourage collaboration/participation in online life that goes well beyond this one day in September. Adopt a nursing home, connect another hotspot — whatever makes sense to you and your friends — but help people all around the world mark the day as part of a global celebration of collaboration and participation online.

OneWebDay: Join Us. Who’s us? Everyone.

We had a great meeting in Vancouver, thanks to the efforts and sponsorship of CIRA (the people who run the Canadian domain, .ca) and CircleID (your place for news about the internet).

We’re so delighted to announce that CIRA is going to be doing a major, well-funded push to support OneWebDay in Canada. They’ve got great plans — including having an “ambassador” go to major cities to talk with people about what the web means to them. These clips can then be put together to make a great brief documentary — and they’ll have a special Canada OneWebDay site that will connect all Canadians from coast to coast to coast. We’re really excited about the CIRA initiative. Bravo, Canada.

Coming out of the Vancouver meetup, we have a number of plans. We’re going to change this site to make it easier for people to post their own stories about how the web has changed their lives. Right now, this blog is run by “administrators” (people with the OneWebDay volunteer organization), and the wiki is for open commentary. But we need these “how my life is different” stories to be front and center, so we’ll add that to the site.

And we’re going to do the viral button push — so you’ll see OWD buttons around you as you visit blogs and other places. Join in!

Tshirts, too, right? Yes, and prizes! WIRED is working on a contest for designing the international hotspot icon, and we’re thinking there are natural connections to OneWebDay. OneWebDay is about peoples’ stories of how the web has changed their lives, and you’ve got to get online to collaborate.

Put this button on your website to help spread the word about OneWebDay!

Copy this HTML and put it on your blog!

<a href="http://www.onewebday.org" title="OneWebDay - Celebrate The Internet"><img src="http://onewebday.org/OWD_Web_Button_150.jpg" height="67" width="150" alt="OneWebDay" border="0"/></a>


The OneWebDay brainstorming tour is coming to Vancouver, B.C. on Thursday, June 15. Here are the details:

Date: Thurs., June 15
Time: 6 to 7:30 pm
Place: Room 400, Simon Fraser Univ. (Downtown Campus)
Address: 515 West Hastings Street

What’s the agenda? We’ll talk about celebrating OneWebDay in Vancouver. Expect the unexpected! Come ready to brainstorm.

We had a great OneWebDay brainstorming session in Austin last night. Jon Lebkowsky blogs about it here.

The local-ness of OneWebDay is one of its strengths. Yes, it’s about making the worldwide collaboration we do online visible, but it’s also local. Austin has a tremendous community of entrepreneurs and techies, and is also very proud of itself as a place to live and do business. So a local OneWebDay get-together, a party to celebrate what the web does for Austin — for education, for government outreach, for jobs — is ideal.

Speaking of local and global, take a look at startup.gr, a blog from Greece that has the OneWebDay logo on its front page. The blog author says there are only 2000 bloggers in Greece and 250K DSL subscribers, and he/she is trying to get Greeks more involved in the web as a participatory medium.

Tonight’s OneWebDay brainstorming session:

6:30 p.m.

The Tavern – 912 W. 12th Street

Austin.

(Next Thursday evening: Vancouver.)

What does the Internet let you that you couldn’t do otherwise? What have you done on the Internet that you couldn’t do anywhere else? Meet people from around the world? Telecommute? Collaborate on projects with people you’ve never met? Participated in interactive art projects? Seen photographs of new addition to family?

One aspect of OneWebDay is that we want to celebrate the unique things that the Internet brings to daily life. From executives checking their Blackberries for emails from , to homemakers paying utility bills on the computer, to college students checking their grades on-line, the Internet has crept its way into routine life in ways that are both transformative and unforseen–in fact, people take it for granted these days. So how has the Internet changed your life?

If you take only one thing away from this site, and this celebration, it should be this:

We’ve never had a network like the Web before. We’ve never been able to collaborate together like this before, at a distance. We’ve never been able to create electronic things together that last and change.

The Web is an interactive medium. Celebrating this interactivity, and making it visible, is the core idea behind Sept. 22, 2006. And Sept. 22, 2007!

On OneWebDay, we’re all going to leave our mark on the web. Join us — join the Web.

Last night’s brainstorming and planning event at NYCWireless was a blast! We had about 30 people in attendance, and some great ideas came out of the meeting. Here are just a few of them:

* Put together a straightforward primer/glossary to demystify terms like “wiki” and “VOIP”
* Get schools to put together international email pen-pal programs
* Demonstrate the multitude of ways to access the Internet–broadband, wireless, cell phones, smart phones…
* Look at how the Internet is becoming a participatory marketplace–e.g. garbagescout.com
* Create open, ad-hoc wireless networks in public spaces that usually don’t have them.
* Publicize Internet statistics–how many new Internet users are there each minute? How many new blogs are started each hour? How many Wikipedia articles are created every minute?

If any of these ideas sparks a brainstorm, leave a comment or add a comment to our wiki!