The official, Mark Surman, Mozilla executive director, urged participation in the "OneWeb Day" set for September 22.

"The first point I want to make is that the people in this room create cool, world-changing technology,", Surman said during a keynote speech at the O'Reilly in San Jose, Calif.  However, the Open Web needs to be protected and stewarded, he said.  The Open Web leverages openly accessible technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS and is hackable and participatory, according to Surman.

Open source software has been a big contributor to the Open Web, Surman stressed. But, during his presentation and an interview afterward, he expressed concerns over threats to network openness in which the Internet could be subject to whims of a 100-year-old telecommunications industry dealing with bandwidth congestion issues. Other problems include a mobile Web that still resembles a phone and Web video that mostly looks like plain old television, said Surman.

"I'm increasingly not convinced that technology alone is enough to preserve the Web we've built and the culture we've built," Surman said.