oneafrikan.com

Last year amidst the Live8 concert and the G8 Summit at Gleneagles, I set up G8Reboot with Damien, in an effort to raise the profile of the G8 Summit and it’s importance. Our position was that there are a lot of web sites, and there are a lot of web users, and probably a high percentage of them are either apathetic or simply don’t know enough about the G8. Also we’re African, and with the focus of last years Live 8 concert on poverty, and some of the G8 focus on Africa, it made sense…

So the idea was to get people to do a reboot of their web sites / blogs / home pages the day before the concert and the summit began, to highlight the issue to the people that visited their sites. During the time before that we asked site owners to add a button to their site, to get more people involved.

All in all we did about 12k hits to the site in the 10 days leading up to the Summit, with traffic coming from various sources, and about 60k hits up until I stopped counting late August last year.

So in my book the initiative was a success although there’s no way to really tell whether the message was gotten accross - we can only hope that the message of “Every single day, 30,000 children die, needlessly, of extreme poverty.” hit home with some people.

This year, I’ve wanted to get it up again in time for the G8 Summit in Russia, building on what we did last year, but I’ve just not had the time needed to dedicate to it and neither has Damien. So I feel kinda guilty and a little bit like a loser - I had hoped to get things moving by the start of June, which then moved to end June / start July, but client work has just had to be the priority (unfortunately keeping a roof over my head, food on the table and building a business has been more of a pressing priority).

My gut feel is that I should pick my battles, and do what I’ve got planned instead for the summit next year in Germany (In the summer of 2007, the annual G8 Summit comes to Germany. The meeting will take place in the Kempinski Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, an exclusive health resort on the East Sea. Heiligendamm is about 20km west of Rostock, 200km from Berlin.), so that there is time to do it properly and to do it the justice that I would really like to.
There also hasn’t been much press about the 2006 Summit in the UK, but there does seem to be a lot more going on online about the Summit in 2007, for what reason I’m not entirely sure.

That said, my gut feel is based on my current situation and on no external input, so it’s not too late to do something, even if it’s something small, but I don’t have the time over the next two weeks to do it all on my own. We don’t live in a perfect world, so I’m happy to concede that something is better than nothing at all…

So, I’m asking you in earnest - what do you think? Should we do something? Would you help me by giving half an hour to an hour of your time to get the word out? Any comments or feedback would be much appreciated