OneWebDay

Once again, the Internet connects people who want to do something with each other. GiveMeaning.com helps people who have find a good cause they care about. Visitors can find organizations either by location or by a specific issue, or by a combination of the two. From the website:
GiveMeaning.com is an online fundraising site emphasizing creative fundraising ideas and other unique forms of charity donation.
Our community is open to all who care to participate

Next time you read a news story that makes you say, “I wish I could do something,” go visit GiveMeaning.com. There’s a good chance that others have felt the same way and you can find an organization trying to fight starvation food, work against oppression, provide medical care, find a place for refugees to live, or whatever good work needs to be done. If no one is doing it already, you can submit a proposal and others who want to do something similar can find you. Maybe you can be the first one to make a difference in that cause.

It’s fascinating how a network that spans the globe and allows us to get to know people from other countries and cultures can also connect us to those we would not have easily found but who live and act only 5 minutes away.

If I heard the title “Internet Wanderer,” the first thing that would come to my mind was the type of surfing I just did at YouTube – browsing around almost randomly as I find something that looks possibly entertaining, clever, or is just cheesy nostalgia. However, the Internet Wanderer I’m referring to in this post is a guy who is going to travel around the USA without any resources but the assistance given by volunteers who find out about his journey through his website, AroundAmericaProject.com. His name is Matt Danzico, and he is part of an experiment to test questions about trust, sharing, and “cultural flattening” among young people across the US.

It should be interesting to follow his journey. Go take a look – maybe you can help Matt on his way.

Well, I’ve started a GoogleMaps mashup page that shows locations related to OneWebDay 2007. That includes Cardozo, where planning meetings are held and locations around the world where we have heard someone wants to hold a local celebration. Go take a look at the OneWebDay 2007 Events Google Map. Please, send an email to dan (at) onewebday.org if you can think of a location I’m missing. I’ll be happy to add it.

Well, we’re building momentum in the big get-out-the-word push this month. AOL and blip.tv are both going to promote OneWebDay 2007 on their sites. That’s in addition to the support from the Internet Society (ISOC), which is asking its chapters to hold events in coordination with OneWebDay and providing financial support to upgrade this website, the Internet Archive, which is hosting videos and promoting OneWebDay, dotSUB.com (video translation enabler), and many others. Good news!

We’ve met with a web designer and plans are underway to update the website. Hooray! The first steps will be to clean up this main page to be less cluttered, making it easier to find what you need, and being a little more focused on the main description and a few recent blog posts.

There will also be a “micro-site” that will be dynamically driven. It will be very media-intensive, with videos, photos, and more.

I’ll post more about this as the details get worked out. Also, you’ll get to see the changes right here, of course. We’re very excited about the upcoming changes, and the designer seems to have really taken this project to heart.

Usual time, usual place – Cardozo School of Law, 55 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor Faculty Lounge, at 7:00 PM onTuesday, July 10th. Topics will include location for New York event, the video mashup project, the website re-design (more on that soon), new participating websites blip.tv, and much more. As usual, the meeting will be no more than an hour – come help us brainstorm, and then help us sift through those ideas and pick out the gems for this year.

We’re asking for some graphic designers (professional or not) who
would like to help out OneWebDay by creating a new sticker for
OneWebDay 2007.

View/Download: Last year’s sticker

We have a template to start with, available as a PNG file: PNG Sticker Template – it is a 1.75″x3.5″ laptop sticker

Feel free to change the font and colors, but please leave the
onewebday.org address at the bottom.

Please submit your designs in a non-lossy format (Photoshop, PNG, etc
are fine) to dan (AT) onewebday.org. There will be a preliminary round of
screening, and then finalists will be posted to the OneWebDay site for
public voting.

The winning design will be used in events held around the world (both
in the physical world and online). The designer will receive free
copies of the stickers, and will be given credit at the NYC event.

Please send only original design work.

You can also post comments on the Sticker Design wiki page.

There is a famous quote by John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier foundation: “The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”

In some places, the damage has been hard to route around. One example of this kind of damage is the Golden Shield Project in China, or, as those who disapprove of this technological censorship tool call it, the Great Firewall of China. The government uses this project to censor websites that it disapproves of and to monitor Internet use by its citizens. Disapproval can be earned by criticism of repressive government behavior, information about outlawed groups, sites about Taiwan, certain religious content, and much more.

Attempts to “route around” this censorship include using VPN or SSH connections to computers outside of China, various open source projects that allow people outside the firewall to provide proxy service, and more. Examples of such software are Psiphon and Tor.

Take a look – maybe you can be part of the attempt to route around the damage that is censorship.