OneWebDay: Today's Events around the World

New York City, the temporary epicenter of OneWebDay, will be host to a whole menu of OneWebDay events. You can read about each event in detail below. Here's a schedule summary:

• Saturday 9/20
  • 2-4pm - Educational Workshops on Web Technology
  • 7-9pm - Tech Demos - Tools for Online Participation in Democracy
  • 9-midnight - OneWebday Party

• Monday 9/22
  • 11:00am - Seniors Rally at City Hall for Digital Inclusion
  • 11:45am-2pm - Main Event in Washington Square Park

Main Event

Where: Washington Square Park, Teen Plaza (SE part of the park)

When: Monday, 9/22/2008, 11:45am to 2pm

Who: Moderator Sree Sreenivasan (Columbia Journalism & WNBC-TV), plus Tim Westergren (Pandora), Prof. Lawrence Lessig (Stanford), Craig Newmark (craigslist), Dharma Dailey (Ethos Group), City Councilwoman Hon. Gale A. Brewer, John Perry Barlow, Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), SJ Klein (OLPC), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard), others.

What: FREE event

Who should attend: Anyone who likes the internet and its transformative effect on human lives

Purpose of this event: To initiate an environmental movement for the internet. The theme this year: online participation in democracy. The internet is under pressure around the world - inadequate connectivity, censorship, huge digital divides threaten its future. This rally is designed to raise awareness of these issues and to help us focus on how the internet has changed democratic involvement in America.

Needed: Publicity, cash contributions to cover expenses (there's a "donate" link on the OneWebDay home page), and attendance - this will be a great event.

One Web Day was celbrated at Bangalore in the http://www.msrit.edu/MSRIT campus.

A Blogging Contest was organized and 150 students participated including first time bloggers who were initiated into Blogging. In this contest with a time limit of 90 minutes, students were asked to blog on any topic (as most of them were first timers) and Winners are to be choosed after evaluating each entry over the next four or five days.

After the Blogging Contest A Talk on One Web Day was made by Sivasubramanian Muthusamy. Another member of ISOC India Chennai, Srinidhi Hande talked about Blogging Techniques.

Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) and the Lehava National project (13 Community Technology Centers around Israel) have initiated collaborated activities for the local community members who are invited to Lehava’s instruction centers, to take part in OneWebDay events, through activities that advance individual point of view, and creativity using the Internet as a means of communication and services.

Planned Activities:

1. Three Days of Open Workshops, in which adults are invited to learn to surf the web, open e-mail accounts, use instant messaging, start blogs, use commercial and e-Gov services and more.

2. Posters and Animation contest – " I wish - My Green Hometown" - young students present their own ideas about Democracy and Environment Protection, using multimedia free tools, to express their point of view.

3. Starting in a pilot project of building a shared photo database for the occasion of “60 Years of Israel” in a shared online WIKI album – "PIKIWIKI" - a joint initiative of the Israel Wikimedia Foundation, Center for Educational Technology and the Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL).

4. Instructing people in the use of technology and peripheral equipment (such as digital cameras, scanners etc.), And raising awareness of copyright issues.

More planned events:

5. Youth@Technology Conference- organized by young initiators together with ISOC-IL and Shenkar College. Details on the event will be posted later.

The events in Israel will be listed on http://www.isoc.org.il (ISOC-IL) web site (in Hebrew). Also see the ISOC-IL English web site.

The 22nd of September this year is also 100 years from the declaration of the Bulgarian independence. The peak of the celebrations will be in Veliko Tarnovo. We will invite 100 people to release 100 balloons with messages on the 21st of September, apart from the other programs already being prepared in Veliko Tarnovo. This way we wish for the Internet's independence to be inviolable.

Also, we are organizing a round table discussion of E.U. planning/policies/legal issues concerning internet freedom. We will invite media, bloggers, and other Internet experts on the 21st of September. This will be organised in both Sofia and Veliko Tarnovo.