Today I'm talking at the Berkman Center (David Weinberger did a post here) and at the MIT Media Lab about OneWebDay. 

What's OneWebDay?

The internet has revolutionized the lives of people all around the world, who treasure the interaction and cultural richness they find online.  Because the internet is made up of machines, people sometimes think of it in a mechanical way – and, often, as a machine that needs to be “fixed.”   But the internet is as interesting and diverse as society itself.  It is also fragile.

Just as we have an Earth Day to celebrate and focus on the health of the Earth, we need a day to celebrate the health and diversity of the internet and our interactions online.  OneWebDay, planned for Sept. 22 of every year, will provide a chance to do that.

On Earth Day (April 22 of every year), hundreds of thousands of individual projects happen, uncoordinated by any central office.  People do all kinds of things on Earth Day, from planting trees to holding educational summits.  OneWebDay will be the same kind of broadly-planned day.  Just like Earth Day was encouraged by a picture of the Earth from space (a blue marble floating alone in a black void), a key element of OneWebDay will be a visualization of the interconnected web available for anyone to use.

But OneWebDay is not just about pictures.  It’s about action.  We’ll be encouraging global efforts to wire villages, connect schools, put up more hotspots, build collective online artworks, write and perform collective online music, show “days on the web,” and many other barn-raising and creative and connecting projects.  We will have a major offline component, with people telling stories about how the web has changed their lives, and showing each other special OneWebDay artifacts.  There’s no limit to what will happen on OneWebDay every year.

How is this going to happen?  Somone has to lead, at least initially, until the day has a life of its own.  I’m meeting with institutions and companies and the entities they point me to.  I’m looking for contacts at each institution to lead volunteer efforts to create infrastructure and spur projects.  Right away, I need help building a web resource at onewebday.org that will provide an easy way to attract, collect, and display information about OneWebDay projects.  Some of these projects, like oral histories of web influence on individual lives, should start right now.  I need help building international networks of institutions to work together on OneWebDay, once the architecture of onewebday.org is set.  And I want to get the word out to people all around the world.  It took seven years to get Earth Day going, and we have a year until OneWebDay.

There have been NetDays in the US and in other countries, and I am planning to coordinate with NetDay organizers.  I need help reaching these people.  The NetDay mission, which focuses on wiring up institutions, is very close to what OneWebDay is.  OneWebDay is also about celebrating individual human interactivity and creativity online – recognizing that the web is not (just) television, but also a human language; that the internet is not (just) machines, but also society.  People light up when we talk about OneWebDay, and my goal is to help that energy become a memorable day each year.

Email for me is scrawford at scrawford dot net.