DrewClark.com

One Web Day Conference Call, 3:30 p.m. ET, Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Notes taken by Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com. Please note: This is my best effort to capture the discussion that took place during the conference call, but I am sure that some errors have crept in. Please e-mail me: drew at broadbandcensus.com, with corrections, or just post them in the comments, if you have additional items to add.

Attendees:
Nathan James, Media and Democracy Fund
Matt Soden (sp?), Web developer
Tom Konnell (sp?), Association Heart Association
John Breyault, Amplify Public Affairs
Heather West, Center for Democracy and Technology
Drew Clark, BroadbandCensus.com
Susan Crawford, OWD founder
Sascha Meinrath, New America Foundation
Heather Greenfeld, Computer and Communications Industry Association
Joly MacFie, Internet Society of New York

Matt Soden:
We have a site up in place, and have been working on getting some of the features and needs. If I had to guess, I would say it is about at the half-way mark.

Nathan James:
Let’s start the call. I think everyone here caught the names of people attending. Matt Soden, a web developer out of Ann Arbor, Mich.

Susan Crawford:
I appreciate the change to talk to all of you. And thanks to Nathan for being a great leader; it is really exciting to see what is going on in D.C. I started OWD four years ago, the first was 3 years ago. OWD is an earth day for the Internet. The Internet is under a lot of pressure; connectivity is inadequate; a lot of censorship; and an extensive digital divide – senior citizens, less-developed worlds. People are more aware of the problems of the Internet: pornography, privacy invasions, peer-to-peer file sharing. The idea is to provide a neutral platform for anyone to use, for starting this environmental movement to protect the structure of the Internet.

We have a board – Mary Hodder, Rick Whitt, Doc Searls, David Weinberger. In Melbourne, they have wikified the planning for the city’s future; and they want to announce what they have come up with on OWD. There is stuff going on in Tunisia, where the ISOC is having a panel and series of celebrations.

There are a lot of demonstrations about online surveillance – the freedom from fear, and they are using OWD as a planning day for celebration.

In Bulgaria, the 200th anniversary, and they want to talk about the future; and releasing 400 balloons.

In SF, the city of SF is using OWD to install refurbished computers in low-income centers, and we are reaching out to tech groups. That is the kind of project I was dreaming of, an earth day, do-gooder.

Tim Wester, founder of Pandora, will talk about the destructive effect of webcasting royalties, Larry Lessig; Gail Brewer. Free classes for the public, and the NYU computer sciences department. Wireless router, a Wikipedia page, and senior citizens, through senior planet, and it was suggested that we might have a lot of 80 year olds protesting.

In Chicago, the Future of Music Coalition is having a workshop for independent musicians.

In Portland, an all-day celebration in a public space.

Other things, in Austin and Los Angeles. This has been an entirely grass-roots, unfunded, decentralized effort. What Nathan and his group are coming up with. The launching of the eDemocracy time capsule. We make progress on social issues when we could see them. Earth day didn’t take off until we could see a picture of the earth from the space. I am trying to make issues of the internet visible. I am really thrilled about what is happening. So excited.

I take the train a lot between NYC and Washington. I began to worry about those people were thinking of the internet as a telephone, or television broadcast system, and didn’t appreciate what a transformative effect it could have. I remember someone handing me an FCC proceeding, IP-enabled services. This is it, the telephone companies in charge of the internet. March 2004, and I started looking around. It was concern on my part, and a recognition that we so easily take the internet for granted. It was time to do sometime simple, and set aside a day, when we don’t take the internet for granted.

John Breyault:
Are their policy-makers that are going to participate?

Susan:
In the past, we have had sympathetic response, but no one has been willing. The mayor of San Francisco.

Nathan:
As for DC, the main push has been to produce the time capsule. By all means, that is an end that we could use some help on

I wrote to Susan, and I reached out to those people. And we brought together a planning organization. Drew Clark and Andrew Bennett of BroadbandCensus.com. Common Cause, NAF, CDT, PBS-Engage, its online electoral process, as well as Public Knowledge and the Sunlight Foundation, and a couple of really prominent individuals. A meeting about 1.5 months ago, what do we want to accomplish. And something that became apparent. 2008 and the electoral campaign, we can definitely say that online was the way democracy was emerging.

The role of public pressure groups in Washington.

The idea came up to create a time capsule.

We didn’t want to create a password system. Anyone can post their text, images, and sound. There are four things that we would like things to post.
1.    short descriptions of their favorite e-democracy tools.
2.    write a letter to the future, so that when it opens
3.    profiles of e-democracy heros; people who are leveraging the internet to make available spaces; we would like people to offer up their friends and colleagues as exemplary
4.    we want to be able to cover some bills in Congress, and at the state level. Create a space that people can write to it.

We would like to mark a day, in 2020, the 15th OWD. Just enough in the future, that some of the policy questions, will have their impact, in the way it operates. What was available online, and to see how it grew, and if major problems to address. No, we wanted more of that, and that is it in a nutshell. We will launch, in beta, on Friday.

If you do blog, draw from this talk. Something interesting is about to happen. We are asking people to tag things DC_OWD

You can link to onewebday.org, not the timecapsule.onewebway.org; and there is a Facebook group that we are using, as one of the primary ways to organize. And then, mostly, I hope that people on the call, will start to think about ways to make contribution, to write about it, and contact other blogger friends and colleagues. The work we did – 75-100 contributions. We want to open it up.

Eventually, we hope we cross a line, to make sure that their work is recorded.

Susan:
Thanks, Nathan. I often get the question, what do ordinary people. Lots of suggestions there, for people who don’t think about Internet policy of the future.

For the last 100 days, we have been asking one person a day to introduce the idea of OWD to introduce it to their networks. I am delighted that Drew Clark has been an ambassador. Craig Newmark has done it, Jimmy Wales will do it. questions@onewebday.org.

Another project, in Chinni (sp?), India, for each of the 100 days, before OWD, people are posting stories, and that is accessible through the OWD web site. Physical events are important, and these events can be small, and informal. It is a drinks gathering, and hope to get the House of Lords.

Ambassador.
Stories program.
Fill in your cities name.

Nathan:
Although the time capsule is a product of the DC, it is intended for a national and international user base.

Drew Clark:
Drew mentions mention that taking the broadband census is something that people can do on One Web Day, and also our series of articles on Broadband Census in the States, as well as the Broadband Census for America conference, on Friday, September 26, 2008.

Joly MacFie:
I help out on the OWD web site.

Susan Crawford:
Will the time capsule be closed?

Nathan James:
We want to retain the idea of, not being able to add to it. It will depend on the answer to whether we can get it.

We want to find a video maker, to make a video presentation of the video that is online. If not, then we may have a closed, no-contribution version. Closed and veiled, on the models

September 22, 2020, which is the 15th One Web Day, it will be an election year again.

John Breyault:
How about Jonathan Zittrain? Is he involved?

Susan Crawford:
There is an event in Oxford.

Joly:
I have video from the launch of his new book in April.

Is the capsule going to be entirely digital?

Nathan:
1.    popularize
2.    to make it a good event – highlighting the urgency
3.    other priorities

Joly:
12-2 is the NY event.

TK:
Shareen Mitchell, a computer center in DC for low-income kids.

Matt Sadon, in Ann Arbor:
I have ties to U of M. and the school of information.

Susan:
One reason that September 22 was picked so that it was early in the school year.
Said she had committed to being involved in One Web Day for at least the next 10 years.

Susan:
Early June in New York, and it was all about online participation, all in honor of One Web Day

Joly:
Said he had some video of the New York event in June.

Nathan:
There are four categories:
1.    best of the political web
2.    about policy issues
3.    letters to the future
4.    e-democracy heros; a lot of the people who are talking.

And some action items there.