Friends of the internet!
In a few days the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body made up of governments around the world, will be meeting in Qatar to re-negotiate International Telecommunications Regulations. These meetings will be held in private and behind closed doors, which many feel runs counter to the open nature of the internet. In response to this, Google is asking people to add their voice in favor of a free and open internet. Those voices are being displayed, in as close to real time as we can manage, on an interactive map of the world, designed and built by Enso, Blue State Digital, and us!
Adding your voice is pretty straightforward: the map will ask you where you are, and if it can find your location, it’ll drop a circle for you right there. I’m in Lynchburg VA today, so I’ve added my voice from here:
Once you’ve added your voice, you can share it — on Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest (which it looks like lots of people already are doing):
The map has also been localized into 23(!) languages, reflecting the world-wide nature of the campaign. So it looks right in Korean, when and where it needs to:
When I sat down to write this the count was 1,230,766; as I look at it now the count has reached up to 1,305,467 and shows no sign of slowing down, so: thanks Google (it’s nice to be linked to from the front page of google.com), and: hooray internet!