OneWebDay

If you’re visiting here because you’ve seen a video recently about OneWebDay, welcome! We hope you’ll come back frequently.

The next OneWebDay is scheduled for Sept. 22, 2007. We’re planning for celebrations of the internet around the world that will take many different forms — parties, lectures, projects to help people feel more comfortable being online, online artistic collaborations, internet access projects, music mashups, projects in high schools and grade schools….

There is a corporation called OneWebDay, Inc. that is based in the United States. We have applied for nonprofit status here, and we’re waiting for that to come through. We plan to provide coordination help to the people around the world who want to celebrate OneWebDay in September 2007. (We have a board of directors — listed here.)

Right now, we’re running this effort on a complete shoestring, and we’re looking for small donations of any kind that will help us defray the costs of making sure people hear about this holiday around the world. There’s a PayPal button on this site — please use it to give us a gift! We promise to spend it wisely.

If you’re interested in helping in non-monetary ways, we need translation help, local coordination help, and general support in blogging and promoting OneWebDay. Brainstorming help, organizing help. This is a collective, volunteer effort, and we’d love to work with you if you’re interested.

Thanks again for visiting, and stay in touch.

We get asked what OneWebDay 2007 will look like. What will happen? Who will be involved?

We don’t know, precisely. We think that there will be celebrations and good deeds (making your mark, helping someone else get online) taking place around the world. We are hoping for collaborative online projects as well as offline teaching sessions and discussions.

OneWebDay will look like whatever you want it to be. It’s not controlled (or controllable) by anyone.

It’s time to start planning OneWebDay 2007 in your town or city or country. We suggest that you hold an in-person session at a public place with wireless access during February. Ask people these questions:

1. What good deeds that have something to do with online access or working together online would you like to work on — that could culminate in late September? Suggest adopting an old-age home, working with a teacher to bring useful technology into a classroom, developing an online artistic-collaboration piece with kids — something visible and helpful.

2. What’s the best way you can think of to celebrate the web? Suggest things like making sure your country’s politicians know how important the web is to you; doing a live interactive wireless meetup in a central place; making a collective video about what the web means to you and posting it online. (We’re confident you can come up with better ideas.)

3. What kinds of skills do you have in the group? Who can do what? Who has time to keep tabs on everyone and remind them about the do-good projects they’ve undertaken?

4. When’s your next meeting? You might want to meet monthly. These meetings can be for all kinds of purposes, not just OneWebDay, but having a theme and a goal can help.

We here at OneWebDay.org were slammed by comment spam recently — more than 7500 comments. It took a long time to clear that up. But — now we’re open for comments again. Sorry if yours was deleted; it was necessary to get rolling again.

Plans are afoot for a “protect your machine” element for OneWebDay 2007.

- “search your PC for rootkits” day (free software is available),

- “why in God’s name are you still not using antivirus software day?”

- “Fix your exploitable IE browser settings day”

Hey, it’s all about empowering the edge.