OneWebDay

Time Magazine’s naming of each of us as the Person of the Year — with a mirror on the magazine’s cover! — is a very OneWebDay move.

“For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you,” the magazine’s Lev Grossman wrote.

The magazine has put a mirror on the cover of its “Person of the Year” issue, released on Monday, “because it literally reflects the idea that you, not us, are transforming the information age,” Editor Richard Stengel said in a statement.

We’re making sure that You (and Time Magazine) take part in OneWebDay 2007. You can show all of the rest of us (who are also Yous) the amazing human potential of the internet.

One thing we might do for 2007 — but we’re shivering at the thought — is have people take a pledge NOT to use the internet on Sept. 22.

And then have those people reflect on what that was like. What if the net wasn’t there? What if you couldn’t work, talk, bank, explore online?

Hmmm?

OneWebDay has two core messages — celebrating the most human network we’ve ever experienced, and doing good works to leave the web a better place than it was before OneWebDay. (Because OneWebDay happens each year on Sept. 22, this is a sort of “continuous improvement” message.)

The idea behind the celebration is to make the web, and our relationship to it, visible. We only make progress when we can see what we’re doing. So we arrange for physical, in-person events in public wireless spaces around the world, and for online collaborative efforts that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The idea behind the good-works projects is to encourage people to get involved with communities they care about — places where access doesn’t exist, places where access is too slow, places where people don’t use the web, or don’t know about free things they can do that will change their lives.

There’s a lot to do, and we’re excited. We’re moving at very high speed.