My friend Susan Crawford has many accomplishments, not the least of which is as the founder of One Web Day, which we’ll celebrate its third incarnation later this month (Sept. 22^nd). Susan and OWD’s planning committee are inviting all of us to contribute text, images, sounds, and video describing their favorite E-Democracy tools into their open blog they’re calling the E-Democracy Time Capsule. Suggestions include writing letters of one’s hope for Web-powered politics, profiling E-Democracy heroes, essays about Internet policy meant to preserve a free and dynamic Web, and the overall potential the Web has for democratic renewal.

The idea behind the Time Capsule is that both politics and technology move very fast, so fast that it’s easy to forget that “these new tools and the people who use them have opened a brand new chapter in the big social experiment we call ‘democracy.'” All of us supporting and participating in this project hope the capsule will serve as a central hub to record what people are doing online now to engage in politics. Since we can hardly imagine what the Internet of the future will look like, Susan writes the Time Capsule hopes to capture what it looks like today for. Heather West at the Center for Democracy & Technology wrote on their PolicyBeta blog that their “goal is that on the 15th OneWebDay in 2020, we can look back and see where we have made progress in e-democracy, and where we’re still working.”

Make your contributions to the capsule as soon as you can.