OneWebDay is an annual day of Internet celebration and awareness held on September 22. The stated goal of founder Susan P. Crawford

Susan P. Crawford

Susan P. Crawford was until December 2009 President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy...

 is for OneWebDay to foster and make visible a global constituency that cares about the future of the Internet.

History

The first ever OneWebDay was held on September 22, 2006. The idea was created by Susan P. Crawford

Susan P. Crawford

Susan P. Crawford was until December 2009 President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy...

, who was an ICANN

ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...

  board member at the time, in association with other Internet luminaries such as Doc Searls

Doc Searls

David "Doc" Searls , co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, is an American journalist, columnist, author and a widely-read blogger, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a fellow alumnus of the Berkman Center for Internet &...

, David Weinberger

David Weinberger

David Weinberger is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto David Weinberger (born 1950 in New York) is an American technologist, professional speaker, and commentator, probably best known as co-author of the...

, David R. Johnson

David R. Johnson

David A. Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yeshiva University and has previously taught at UCLA and Syracuse University. Raised in Nebraska, he earned his BA from the University of Nebraska, where he studied under Robert Audi, and his PhD from Princeton University. His areas of...

, Mary Hodder, and David Isenberg, who would all join the board of what would eventually become a 501(c)3 corporation - OneWebDay Inc. A website was established and a global network of events promoted. The 2006 OneWebDay's anchor celebration featured Craig Newmark

Craig Newmark

Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...

, Scott Heiferman

Scott Heiferman

Scott Heiferman is CEO and a co-founder of Meetup, a service that helps people use the internet to organize local community groups with local offline meetings. Meetup originally gained notoriety as the grassroots backbone of the Howard Dean presidential campaign in 2004...

, and Drew Schutte as speakers in New York City's Battery Park

Battery Park

Battery Park is a 25-acre public park located at the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan Island in New York City, facing New York Harbor. The Battery is named for artillery batteries that were positioned there in the city's early years in order to protect the settlement behind them...

.

By 2008 OneWebDay had grown to more than 30 international events. In Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park is one of the best-known of New York City's 1,900 public parks. At 9.75 acres , it is a landmark in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village, as well as a meeting place and center for cultural activity...

 NYC speakers included Crawford, John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow is an American poet and essayist, a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who has been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He is also a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic...

, Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan L. Zittrain is a US professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a faculty co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society...

, Craig Newmark

Craig Newmark

Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...

, and Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

.

In May 2009, after founder Crawford had joined the Obama administration, Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

 took over chairmanship of OneWebDay. It was also announced that funding had been granted by the Ford Foundation

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

.. A ning-based organizing network was set up.

In April 2010 it was announced that OneWebDay would "retire its brand" and be folded into a new Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

 year-round initiative called Drumbeat..

In August 2010, a number of veterans took over organizing the 2010 event on a volunteer basis. A new website/network was established. Events took place in several cities including New York City, Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

, Kolkata, Chennai

Chennai

Chennai , formerly known as Madras or Madarasapatinam , is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located on the Coromandel Coast off the Bay of Bengal. Chennai is the fourth most populous metropolitan area and the sixth most populous city in India...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, and Pachuca

Pachuca

Pachuca, formally Pachuca de Soto is the capital of the Mexican state of Hidalgo. It is located in the south-central part of the state. Pachuca de Soto is also the name of the municipality of which the city serves as municipal seat...

.

In 2011, the main event is a presentation in New York City by Bob Frankston

Bob Frankston

Robert M. Frankston is the co-creator with Dan Bricklin of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program and the co-founder of Software Arts, the company that developed it....

- "Infrastructure commons - the future of connectivity".