What I learned from OneWebDay1
It's not time to start thinking about OneWebDay2 yet. I do think OneWebDay2 will be more substantive, more widespread, and noisier than OneWebDay1. But we'll get going on that later.
We had to start somewhere, and it was a more than respectable start. I'm so grateful for the interest of so many people. I had an awful lot of help in making sure that visible things would happen around the world. And there are many many pictures, videos, and blogposts out there that weren't there before, and many people who thought about the web's impact on human lives yesterday that had never had that perspective before.
The idea behind OneWebDay1 was to assist the process of consciously building a worldwide view that the web is, by and large, helpful to people. I got asked many times (by non-techies) during the last 18 months why we should celebrate the impact of a medium that has such a negative impact on life — isn't it a cesspool for crime? isn't it destructive of social interaction? isn't it destructive of the fabric of society as a whole?
I hope that people who are interested in OneWebDay are interested in combatting that view and in recognizing the overwhelming potential of the internet to assist humans, to augment our lives, and to enrich our interactions. The internet is under pressure around the world from a variety of directions, and OneWebDay is designed to create counter-pressure from the people who interact online.
I learned that there are many people around the globe who appreciate this message. It's a big world out there, and it will take a while for this celebration to be as multilingual and multicultural as it should be. And it will take fundraising, marketing, and serious corporate attention to make this celebration have the impact it should. I'm in this for the long haul.