As Mitchell argued recently, the web is a precious public resource. It’s a resource worth protecting and improving. This is what Mozilla is about. It’s also a resource worth celebrating. Which is where One Web Day comes in.
Billed as ‘Earth Day for the Web’, One Web Day is about celebrating the awesomeness that is the web. At the most basic level, it’s asking people to take five minutes to raise their (virtual) hands to say ‘I love the web’. This is a simple idea, and also a very important one if want more people to think about the web as a public resource.
I’ve been asking people recently: What’s one simple thing the Mozilla community could do to make a massive and wonderful noise on One Web Day? Ideas so far:
- Ask people to donate their Twitter and Facebook status, saying something like: “I love the open web! Support One Web Day.”
- Do a massive number of Internet Health Audits, replacing copies of IE6 and old Flash plug-ins en masse.
- Help raise funds to support One Web Day activities. (We’ve already started doing this, but could be louder about it.)
- Talk about the open web and Mozilla technologies at local One Web Day events, or simply show up at a local event.
- Simply ask people to click a button that says: I pledge my support for the open web and One Web Day.
Which of these ideas resonate most for you? And, what else do you think the Mozilla community could do on One Web Day? It feels like there have to be more ideas than just the ones above. It would be great if we could find at least one that was super simple and potentially viral.
At some moment in time access to the Internet will need to be considered an integral component of social participation (especially in the context of measures such as HADOPI and national firewalls etc.).
Does it not follow that at that point also be considered for inclusion in the UN Covenant for Cultural, Economic and Social rights? (http://www.hrweb.org/legal/escr.html )
Perhaps One Web Day might instigate a global campagin for this, and other forms of official recognition of the necessity for Internet access to be inclusive?
One way to exponentially increase the strength of the celebration would be to have the site translated to as many languages as possible. So far the site seems to be in English only.
For other ways, a persona and a theme are probably in order, as well as buttons and banners.
High resolution OneWebDay images would help make cool T-shirts for people who may want to celebrate that way.
Sounds like a great opportunity for the Foundation to assert that there’s one open web for everyone, not just a web for browsers whose names are “Firefox” and another, lesser, shuttered web for equally-capable browsers whose names are not “Firefox”.
See, for instance, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=geckoisgecko The Mozilla Evangelism Team and savvy web developers could offer to help sites fix their busted sniffing code or update browser detection documents for best practices in the post-NS4/IE5/NS7/Moz1 era.
The impression that I got from onewebday.org of what OneWebDay day is all about is that it is focused on local community events and the same for Mozilla Service Week. “…you can make a serious difference in your local community” (http://mozillaservice.org/learn_more/volunteer/en_US).
Now there are only two weeks until things really get started, but shouldn’t there have been an equal focus on doing this all globally online?
After spending a fair amount of time on http://www.idealist.org/if/mozservice09 searching for an opportunity to volunteer, I did find one in my state, but not close by or close enough. I actually found the organization that I’ll be helping by browsing through Web Design and not through a local search. I almost chose one in another country, it was just a coincidence that the one I chose was in Massachusetts.
I’ll be doing all of my volunteering from my desk chair and so the main point is I believe that more volunteers may/may have stepped up if they knew that they could contribute outside of their local communities which makes perfect sense anyway considering that we are all connected to the same Web.
I’m sorry that I got involved so late into this or else this info may have been more useful when planning things.
There is always next year though.
@Percy
I searched for a hi-res OneWebDay logo to make some promotional graphics (all that I found were in jpeg format) until I finally went back to http://onewebday.org/documentation/ and discovered a PDF of it.
I converted the PDF to SVG and PNG (piece of cake with Inkscape or Illustrator) and then contacted Nathaniel James to ask what the license was for the logo (so that I could make and distribute promos) and suggested providing the formats that I converted the logo to on onewebday.org.
I didn’t get an answer about the logo’s license or permission to create and distribute promos. I was told that they will be publishing buttons, banners, etc this week “for any non-commercial use by OWD participants next week”
What if I’m an advocate but not a participant? We all know the impact of Firefox promotional graphics. I suppose that you can’t help those that don’t want it.
My idea/suggestion for Mozilla for One Web Day is, how about a Mozilla hosted page/site that allows people to leave comments on how they’re celebrating One Web Day, how they’re contributing, what they love about the Web and what they get out of it?
Hey Ken. Just noticed this comment in spam filter. Sorry about that.
I agree we need a way to celebrate that is more global and online. The poster idea from yesterday is a combo of local and online. Your simple comment board idea is also a good one. Like it.
From Gina Cooper by email:
I vote for option 5. And then redirect to a thank you page and ask people to take another step
-tweet this
-take a survey
-complete the sentence “my favorite thing to do on the Internet is——-” and do something with it, like add to a word cloud (may get porn answers, though)
-sign up for a newsletter
-join a community
-send a note to their representatives (interesting new technology: http://app.northisup.com/politwit/)
Hi
Interesting thread.
I was webmaster for OWD last year and am involved in the NYC event this year.
I like all the ideas above very much, and will promote them for further discussion in our local group.
On the topic of speaking, in NYC we are running a forum on Sat 19 Dec at NYU. Our theme is Universal Broadband, but if someone from Mozilla would like to briefly addres open standards they could possibly be fit in.
On the topic of global celebration, what we did do last year was have one page on the wiki (now defunct) where activities were logged.
We had a unified ustream.tv presence and it was great on the day to be able to tune in the various events live. We intend to webcast all our NYC events again this year. I think we will use livestream this time.
I’ve spoken to a couple of local music venues suggesting they consider webcasting their shows on that day, and there is interest although it’s likely to take more handholding than we have capacity for.
It strikes me that OWD could become known as a day when everybody goes live on the web.
I think OWD should consider organizing live.onewebday.org as the definitive URL for discovering all such activity.
Because of the management transition we got off to a bit of a slow start this year, but I believe even small steps to establish such an effort could pay off handsomely in the future.
Update and for the record.
OneWebDay will be adding hi-res formats of the OneWebDay logo to their site.
Quite cool indeed.
It looks like many people got off to a slow or late start. I plan on contributing in whatever way that I can to OneWebDay now that I’m aware of it and can see where my efforts may help.