OWD ideas

Broader scope, simpler participation?
It would be great to have OWD something that every institution involved with publishing, sharing, learning, or literacy is actively a part of -- even if it's something as simple as signing a declaration of / affirmation of OWD principles (and receiving a free stack of stickers to pass around...) Sj

International outreach
With simpler participation comesa simpler localization of the core of what it means to be an OWD participant, something that can be localized cleanly and catchily in a hundred languages. Sj

Starting new sites

 * ...@ libraries, schools, OLPC sites.


 * For starting new sites (more concretely than having some sort of 'engagement' from tens of thousands of locales :) -- how do you get a new site up and running?
 * * OLPC have local deployments underway in Peru, Uruguay, Colombia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Gaza, India, Afghanistan, and the US (Alabama, Pennsylvania, Illinois, NY). There are many other smaller schools around.  Say a middle school wanted to host an OWD event -- what should they do first?


 * For hooking libraries and schools ... there are ~50,000 public non-school libraries in the US, and word is that over 1/3 of the traffic for smaller libraries is people coming to ues the internet. This drives librarians crazy -- what should they do about it?


 * For universities : there are 30,000 unis in the world, all considering in one form or another how to use the web to help teachers, and how to publish and share their educational efforts online - within an intranet, to the world at large for a fee, under copyright or under a free license...

Event kits
If I want to start an event, I'd love to be able to raise funds for a $500 event kit that included swag, printed material, anything else needed to get started. It would be worthwhile for people to make something like this by putting the heads of a few active groups together well in advance, and then organizing a bulk run of most of the materials involved.

All in all, the cost of the kits could be a minor contribution to the cause; whoever is mass producing them should make a small profit to cover the risk of having stock that sits unused for a year, gets lost, &c. Sj

party like it's Web time
Let's not discount the value of a good global party : it's important to get younger people involved in the movement. Especially for engaging people everywhere in the world. the less importance is placed on particular wordings, the more universal the 'language' involved, the easier it is for people everywhere to hear their own passions echoed in the event.

Talk to Tim Hwang @ roflcon - who's been hosting regular Information Superhighway events of late - and focus on how to make this interesting to student groups of all ages. if the web is all about exploratoin and explosions of ideas and fun, it shouldn't be mainly talking about policy (even if it's talking about how to protect and build on the web!). noone would remember halloween if it were a holiday about the importance of paganism...

Talk to Taking IT Global about these digital literacy topics; they've been working with a mainly non-US base of students for a decade, and doing it joyously, colorfully, in every part of the world.