[1]Web We Want/Southbank Centre Festival. Image used with permission.
25 years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee built the World Wide Web and gave it to the world. To celebrate this revolutionary technology and all it has to offer, a coalition of arts and digital rights groups are convening a three, multi-day festivals this year at London's Southbank Centre – which will be designed by you, the users who make the Web what it is today.
We need you!
The festival will be an extensive celebration of how the Web has changed our lives. Inspired by the World Wide Web Foundation [2] and working in partnership with the Foundation’s Web We Want [3] global campaign for a free, open and universal Web, it will also explore some of the things that threaten the Web as we know it and what solutions we might find to these challenges.
Mirroring Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the Web as a place for equality, we’re asking you – local and distant community groups, neighbors and strangers, techies and technophobes, old and young, urban and rural, with any level of web-literacy – to make this event your own.
To do this, we are asking everybody to answer these five questions:
- What Web projects have you encountered that leap borders or conventional approaches to change people's lives? #LeapBorders
- What do you think are the best examples of creativity and artistic imagination on the Web? #creativity
- What examples of personal, corporate or government online action threatens the future of a free, open and universal Web? #OpenWeb
- What aspects of the Web give you the greatest joy and the greatest worry? #joy #worry
- What ideas, projects or schemes would you suggest we present at the festival to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Web? #ideas
Share your answers and ideas on social media — @WebWeWantFest [4] on Twitter (or using the #WebWeWantFest hashtag) or Southbank Centre on Facebook. Or make a short video and submit it to the Southbank Centre YouTube channel [5]!
The deadline for ideas for the September weekend is 29 August 2014, but keep ideas coming until May 2015.
Anyone can contribute, all contributions will be treated equally, and you can answer the questions as many times as you like and on behalf of other people, with their permission. Email webwewant@southbankcentre.co.uk with any questions.
What next?
Your content will come to life online and across three real-life festival weekends at Southbank Centre - 26-28 September 2014, 28-30 November 2014 and 29-31 May 2015 – curated by Southbank Centre and World Wide Web Foundation.
Learn more by visiting the Web We Want Festival page [6], Southbank Centre social media feeds, or our Tumblr [7] for updates.