As posted to the Berkman Center weblog...

Yesterday Berkman fellows, staff, and faculty met with Susan Crawford, a long-time Berkman friend, to talk about her idea, OneWebDay. What follows is a guest blog post from Susan introducing you to the idea -- if you would like to get involved, please contact Susan at scrawford at scrawford dot net.

Earth Day was founded both to celebrate the beauty of the ?blue marble? and to energize people to preserve its fragile balance. Now we need an Internet Day to celebrate the health and diversity of the Internet, and to remind people they need to work to maintain the values that have made the Internet such a gift to all of us.

On Earth Day (April 22 of every year), hundreds of thousands of individual projects happen, uncoordinated by any central office. People plant trees, clean up river banks, and hold educational summits. OneWebDay (September 22 of every year) will be the same kind of broadly-planned day, with local events planned by local residents ? whether their locality is a spot on the earth or a place on the Net.

We?ll encourage global efforts to wire villages, connect schools, put up more hotspots, build collaborative online artworks, write and perform collective online music, assemble montages of a ?day on the web,? collect and publish personal narratives, and as many other barn-raising, creative and connective projects as the collective genius of the Net can imagine. We will strongly encourage offline activities, to build community and to encourage more people to join the global conversation. There?s no limit to what will happen on OneWebDay every year.

How is this going to happen? The private and public sectors are going to pitch in. 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. Some needs are more pressing than others. For example, I need immediate help building a web resource at onewebday.org that will provide an easy way to attract, collect, and display information about OneWebDay projects. (We need a logo!) Some of the OneWebDay 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. We also need sites and institutions to take the lead in creating OneWebDay activities for next September 22.

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. OneWebDay is also about celebrating individual human interactivity and creativity online ? recognizing that the web is more like a human language than like slow TV; 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 so that we together can cherish and maintain the values the Internet enables.

Contact me at scrawford at scrawford dot net. My blog is http://scrawford.blogware.com. If you're a Harvard student who would like to get involved, let me or Catherine Bracy know. I'll be visiting DC on 9/29 and SF on 10/12-14 -- let me know if you'd like to talk about OneWebDay in either of those cities.

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