With all the talk of potential threats to (and from) the Internet, a group of net.advocates are suggesting that we celebrate its "health and diversity" with an annual, global event called One Web Day, which was inspired by Earth Day. The first One Web Day will be September 22, and the plan is ... not so much a plan as a network of coordinators in various cities who will work locally to create diverse events (as in health and diversity). Says the One Web Day faq (written by some inspired human being),
We hope the celebrations will affirm Web values in ways that actually advance those values. Maybe your local community will make wifi available to a school or a park. Maybe youll set up a real-world or online clinic to help newbies succeed on the Web. Maybe youll collect and post stories to document local history. Maybe youll post a gallery of online art. Maybe youll find and share five new weblogs from around the world. It really is up to you.
The OWD blog says it's about "get[ting] the techies together with the non-techies to dream up ways to celebrate the internet by making it visible – creating a good-news day for the web."
Where I live, in Austin, Texas, we're a hotbed of Interweb activity; everybody from straitlaced corporate types to bohemian gamers has broadband, wireless, a web site or blog, and a few ideas they could fold into the OWD mix... so we might have many "One Web Day" projects springing up. One of the OWD organizers, Susan Crawford, flew in from New York for a day to plant inspiration with a small but ambitious group of coordinators led by Donna Kidwell.
Austin will dive in with both feet, but it will be even cooler to see projects from webophiliacs around the globe, including those who live in places that we don't traditionally think of as "web-enabled." Consider all the countries represented by Global Voices Online, for instance, and all the small towns lit up by municipal broadband projects.
What are you doing on One Web Day?
