OneWebDay

The New York City OneWebDay event is looking for a location! We’re currently trying to find an outdoor space with wireless access. There are a few Downtown locations with free wireless that we’re checking. We’re also looking at a few indoor locations.

If you have an idea, especially if you know of a location that would be available, please let us know by contacting me: dan at onewebday dot org. Also, we have an NYC OneWebDay Event Location planning page, if you’d like to participate in the planning stage.

Our meeting tonight (OneWebDay at Meetup.com) went well. News from the meeting: the Internet Archive (of Wayback Machine fame and much more) will be participating – publicizing, hosting content, and making it easy for people to upload OneWebDay content, as well as working to collect a museum of materials on global warming and democracy.

I’ll post more ideas later, but suffice it to say, there is a lot afoot. Let us know if you have any ideas, both for the event here in NY or elsewhere. Start your own event – this is a worldwide celebration!

I was given a reminder today of how the Internet lets us connect to people we probably would never have found. I was looking up information on a relative and came across a post on an online forum that briefly mentioned my grandfather’s name. I emailed the person who posted and we discovered that she was my great-uncle’s granddaughter. We hope to share genealogy information to find out more about our ancestors here in the U.S. Without the Internet, this kind of research was only possible by each person traveling to other states and digging through old files. Now, at least, we can share the information with each other. The Internet not only makes research and communication possible, but there are even places where the data can be stored and worked on collaboratively.

Another recent example: my wife recently got back in touch with her best friend from 4th grade – despite that fact that her friend lives in England.

The Internet helps us find people we never knew before or re-discover old friends – that is just one of the many reasons we celebrate OneWebDay. Send us your Moments of Awareness on the linked wiki page.

– Dan

A major purpose of OneWebDay (coming up on September 22, 2007) is to gather a worldwide constituency that cares about the future of the internet. This is a multilingual, cross-border, online group, and it needs to be able to look around and see the other people who also care.

So this is a celebration as well as, like Earth Day, a day of reflection and concern. It’s a day to make this group visible and for this group to be self-conscious (in the best possible way). It’s a day to talk about how the net has changed lives and how we’d like it to change lives in the future.

How do you make a multilingual, cross-border, online group visible? Get in touch with us at dan at onewebday.org if you have ideas.

We’ve got OneWebDay stickers using the design from last year. However, we’re considering have a design competition for a new sticker design. Go look at the current design in the Wiki and see what you think. I’ll be posting more later about design parameters. Feel free to add comments to the Sticker Design Competition Wiki page.