OneWebDay 2012: Intel Ultrabook giveaway celebration

INTEL GIVEAWAY: For the love of the web and technology

OneWebDay is the day to celebrate a wonderful thing we all love and cherish. Something most of us would be lost without – the Internet. OneWebDay is a global event held every September 22 (since 2006) to celebrate the Internet and also to raise awareness of the importance of open networking principles that have made it the success that it is.

Intel are celebrating OneWebDay by giving away Intel Ultrabooks in Spain, Russia, South Africa and Germany. How did they get selected? For their love of the Internet! They’ve been highly engaged and active online and Intel wanted to reward them by giving them an Ultrabook to ensure they get the most of the online world with a proper Ultrabook.

The suggested theme for this year’s events is to emphasize local content as a way of making the Internet available and useful for our communities. Earlier in the year a joint report of the Internet Society, UNESCO, and the OECD – The Relationship Between Local Content, Internet Development, and Access Prices – revealed just how important local content is to building a connected society.

Mr Markus Kummer from the Internet Society stated:

“This study confirms the strong relationship between local content and Internet infrastructure. Keeping the traffic local and building up local content is key for improving access to the Internet. As the volume of local content increases around the world, the Internet becomes more relevant and has a greater impact on improving the lives of local communities.”

The coming rollout of many more Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in many non-western scripts can only serve to accelerate this process.

So how can you participate in OneWebDay?

• On September 22, celebrate OneWebDay on Twitter by singing praise to the benefits of an Open Internet by using the hashtag #OneWebDay
• Add the OneWebDay badge to your website/blog. Organize and participate in local events. Check what groups are in your area and collaborate!
• At local events, and in social media, feature local content makers, bloggers, wikipedians, webcasters, websites, etc.
• Contribute a story to the OneWebDay stories blog. Tell us what your favorite local content sites are and why, and comment on other people’s stories. There are some great stories and videos on here already from previous years. Be sure to check them out.

Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay, offers some more background as well as other ways we can get involved with OneWebDay in this video interview with Rocketboom.

Susan Crawford of OneWebDay

I was interested to learn how OneWebDay was inspired by Earth Day. A view of our fragile Earth from the perspective of space makes us understand that we have something important to protect. Like the web, and issues of censorship, lack of access and not enough personal input, we need to work together to protect it and steer it in the right direction for the future. Let’s get involved!

Useful Links:

• The Internet Society – started in 1992 by the founders of the Internet as an organizational home to the Internet Engineering Task Force. The Internet Society now has more than 100 organisational and more than 28 000 individual members in over 80 chapters around the world – all working to ensure best practices, policies and development of the web.
• At-Large – the community of individual Internet users who participate in the policy development work of ICANN. Currently, more than 100 groups represent the views of individual Internet users throughout the world, participating in building the future of the worldwide Domain Name System (DNS).

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