Around the turn of the millennium, a small group of English radicals decided to launch something a bit like a magazine, only on the internet.
As the openDemocracy legend goes, this was seen by many as a bizarre idea. The word ‘blog’ had only just been invented, and while some newspapers were starting to develop websites – guardian.co.uk was launched in 1999 – these were very much offshoots of paper products.
But they pushed on. The alter-globalisation movement, which would storm to the world’s attention in Seattle in November 1999, needed a media. openDemocracy Ltd was incorporated as a company on 8 October 1999 and, after a long pregnancy in which funds were raised, was born as a weekly online magazine in May 2001.
