Features
Peace One Day Goes Digital
Throughout its ten years of operation, Peace One Day has sought creative means for encouraging others to join its efforts to make Peace Day, 21 September, an annual day of global cease-fire and non-violence. POD has used everything from film to print to live music to education – even football matches. Jeremy Gilley, founder of Peace One Day, and himself an award-winning documentary filmmaker, explains, “The only way we’ll reach billions of people with our message of Peace Day is to enable others to become part of the process of creating and sharing the Peace Day ‘story’. People will contribute to the ‘story’, but you have to recognize that not everyone is comfortable expressing himself or herself in the same medium.”
And now, with internet usage approaching one-quarter of the earth’s population – including rates as high as 75% in some regions of the globe – Peace One Day is looking to further its presence online. “We’re trying to intersect with people at a place where they not only go on a regular basis but from where they can easily spread the message of Peace Day to others,” says Gilley.
Here are just a few of the ways that people can now interact with Peace One Day online:
Peace One Day Website
The recently re-designed Peace One Day Website is now live and capable of accommodating an entirely new scale of user involvement on Peace Day. “Our vision for the website,” explains Peace One Day founder, Jeremy Gilley, “is that it becomes a ‘peace portal’ for holding and sharing content related to peace, non-violence, and sustainability, from around the world.”
Visitors to the site are encouraged to log their own commitment to peace for 21 September. You can see commitments for Peace Day on the newly designed ‘visualiser’, a map powered by Google that captures the global scale of Peace One Day, including football matches and screenings of Jeremy’s award-winning documentary film, The Day After Peace. And, as Peace One Day is truly global, the website is now available in all six of the official languages of the United Nations – Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Peace One Day has an active and growing community of supporters on a number of social-networking or “social media” websites, including a page on Facebook. There, POD has initiated its 'Million People for Peace' Campaign, an effort to build a community of 1,000,000 supporters of the site, before 21 September 2009.
YouTube
July 2009 also saw the re-launch of Peace One Day’s branded channel on YouTube. Visitors to the site can access ready-made playlists, including highlights of The Day After Peace, Jeremy’s award-winning documentary, previous Peace One Day Concerts (which feature towering figures from the world of music, such as Annie Lennox, Lenny Kravitz, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Adams, and Yusuf, among others) and clips from football matches played as part of the One Day One Goal program. In addition, Jude Law, Sir Paul and Stella McCartney, are just a few of the familiar faces who offer video clips in which they provide their own take on what peace means to them.
It’s little wonder that, just days after the re-launch, the Peace One Day site could be found among the Top 25 non-profit channels on YouTube. This should bode well for Peace One Day’s upcoming “Make Peace Campaign”, a user-generated video contest, where individuals will be invited to create short videos illustrating the actions that they are taking to help make peace on 21 September. Additional details will be announced in the coming weeks.
Peace One Day has also ventured into the world of Twitter. Anyone can now follow Peace One Day founder, Jeremy Gilley, on his Twitter profile, where he provides regular updates about the latest news and events from Peace One Day.
So now is your chance: log on and take action for peace.