http://Home.nyc

New York, October 20, 2009 - When Corona.nyc, JacksonHeights.nyc, Melrose.nyc, ParkSlope.nyc,  SoHo.nyc, Tribeca.nyc and 300 other neighborhood names become available upon the activation of the .nyc TLD, how will traditional civic practices be affected? What impact will their activation have on existing digital communication channels? How can we develop policies that assure that these names are used to serve resident needs? What local content should be made available to each dotNeighborhood? What technology should deliver it? Who should publish them? What’s the agreement that assures accountability?

We began focusing on these and related questions on our dotNeighborhood pages earlier this year and have sponsored several public meetings to generate interest and thought on the possibilities.

To further the knowledge base on dotNeighborhoods, Connecting.nyc Inc. recently contracted with the Urban Development Workshop at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Under the able eye of Prof. Jill Simone Gross, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, a research team of Jennifer Dong, Barry Kogan, Matt Leiderman, and Melanie Reyes will detail the digital resources that currently exist within several identified neighborhoods and present the potential benefits that .nyc might offer. Entitled “A Case Study - Neighborhoods in a Digital Era” the report will be completed by year’s end.

­New York, June 30, 2009 - ­Th­e New York City Council is considering a legislative proposal, Intro. 991, that would improve public access to “raw data” held in city databases. Yesterday, in testimony before its Technology in Government Committee, headed by Council Member Gale Brewer, Connecting.nyc Inc. urged the use of the .nyc TLD in facilitating access and management of city databases.

In essence, we urged that the city think of a database as a thing, similar to a bench, a tree, a light post, or fire hydrant. And that a .nyc domain name be assigned to each database. The great thing about giving a domain name to each database (or other “thing”) is that you can then have a conversation about that database.

For example, think about the police department’s crimes database, and let’s take Mayor Bloomberg’s lead and call it “­crimes.data.nyc.” By giving it an intuitive name - http:/ /www.crimes.data.nyc - ­you facilitate the work of ­programmers, but you also create a market place for that database. So at the crimes.data.nyc­­ URL you would find: ­

• a detailed description of the data,
• a link to download the raw data,
• an ongoing conversation of how it “might” be used if only this or that was changed or added,
• comments and possibly a discussion by people who object to it containing too much information,
• a suggestion that a particular field should require privacy access­,

• notations and links to the different apps where the data has been used, and

• ­a civic advocate / entrepreneur match program for locating people with similar interests and a desire to jointly develop apps based on the crimes.data.nyc ­data set.

Learn more about this and see our council testimony.  (Commons Photo courtesy of equinoxefr.)­

Learn more about the Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages. ­­­

Jackson Hts., NY, June 10, 2009 - Earlier this week Connecting.nyc Inc. filed comments with the NTIA on the role of cities within the ICANN governance structure. We recommended opening two governance channels to facilitate cities’ participation in ICANN processes:

• Technical Participation - Through membership on the extant Registry Constituency enabling city registry operators to participate in the technical management of the DNS.
  
• Representative Participation - Through access to a new channel enabling “representation of cities within the ICANN’s executive decision level.”
  

See our On the Participation of Cities in the ICANN Processes wiki page for our NTIA comment and related information.

Learn more about the Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­­December 20, 2008, New York City - Connecting.nyc Inc. submitted comments to ICANN on the draft RFP (Request for Proposals) for new TLDs on December 15th. While we compliment ICANN for the many positive steps it has taken toward enabling cities to have TLDs, we took issue with several points in the 100+ page draft RFP. Our most significant concern is with the financial requirements suggested in the draft RFP:

• One-time Application Fee - $185,000
• Annual Registry Operator Fee - $75,000
• Financial Stability Assurance - $40,000 surety bond per year (est.)
  
• Per-name Fee - $.25
  

The first three of these will alter the nature of our operation and the type of financing we seek. (And they will have a huge negative impact on small registries, for example, should the Iroquois nation seek a TLD.)

But for New York City the per-name fee is the most troubling. Our comments present several scenarios where per-name fees will crush DNS innovation. Here are a few examples from those comments: 

By way of example consider the way per-name fees will inhibit our experimenting with the DNS’s role in advancing city life. For example, some are suggesting that civic discourse might be enhanced by issuing a second level name to each registered voter. Will we be able to consider such a project with the proposed fees? With 3,944,000 registered voters, and a $.25 fee per name, we’d need an additional $1,000,000 in ICANN fees to explore this possibility.

There are several ways to remedy this, one being that fees for names identifying things, locations, and foundation civic needs - education and health - ­ be excluded from the per-name charges. We will be discussing this alternative with ICANN.

We had several other concerns and suggestions with our full comments available here. (Commons photo courtesy of sam.)

Learn more about The Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­­November 25, 2008, New York - We received a positive response to our grant application to the Knight Foundation as follows:

“We have completed our review of your application to the Knight News Challenge for Issue-Communities. Congratulations! You have been selected to complete a full proposal.”

Over 2,000 submissions were sent to Knight for part of their hefty News Challenge Grant fund. Of those, 275 remain in contention. In previous years Knight issued about 10 grants, so our chances remain slim, particularly as many of the other submissions are quite good.

We’ve created  a wiki page describing the Issue-Communities concept. If you have any thoughts, send them our way. Knight will not be making a decision on this until the summer, giving others the chance to develop the Issue-Communities independently - with our best wishes - or to join us in making it happen.

Regrettably, there won’t be a public comment opportunity at the Knight website for the second round applications where we had hoped for additional comments on the concept. But our enhanced application (better organized, more details, and with answers to several additional questions) is available on our wiki - see our Issue-Communities page. Let us know what you think.

(Revised December 20, 2008.) (Commons photo courtesy of Geoffrey Rockwell.)  

Learn more about The Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­­New York, November 21, 2008 - MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media has selected Connecting.nyc Inc.’s “Campaign for .nyc” as a community partner project.

The Center for Future Media is a collaboration of the Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies. The Center defines civic media as “any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting.”

We’re delighted to have this association with the Center. It promises to be another site where people can learn about our effort and make suggestions about .nyc’s role in creating a more livable city. And we’ll visit the Center often to learn from the civic media developments by the Center and our fellow partners. Visit us at the Center.

Learn more about The Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­November 2, 2008, New York - Last night we responded to a Knight Foundation request for proposals on ways to improve community communication. We responded with a proposal entitled Issue-Communities.

We’ve created  a wiki page describing the Issue-Communities concept and invite your thoughts. Should you find it  a reasonable idea, click on that page’s link to the Knight Foundation and indicate your level of approval - from 1 to 5 stars.

2,100 proposals were submitted and the Foundation is relying on user generated reviews - that’s you - to help make the cream rise to the top. An esteemed panel will pick the 50 top proposals which will be asked to detail their idea. But they can’t read all 2,100 submissions. So they need your help.

Our proposal ends with “We are entering an era when a comment such as, ‘I read about this travesty…’ will naturally be followed by ‘And what did you do about?’ With the assortment of tools available to address the issue, a response of ‘nothing’ will be unacceptable. Within an issue-community environment just bitching will become socially unacceptable.” 

There’s a $5,000,000 grant pool to be shared by the winners. See our Issue-Communities page. (Commons photo courtesy of Geoffrey Rockwell.)  

Learn more about The Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­September 27, 2008, New York - In June, as part of our Civics Project, we reached out to city employees requesting that they suggest domain names that might be set aside to help city government better perform its multitude of tasks.

This fall we are setting aside an important layer of names to aide the city’s vital civic sector. Variously identified as community, civic, block, resident, neighborhood, youth, and senior associations, groups, or organizations, they connect residents with one another to address local needs, and they connect to government when necessary.

Over the past weeks we’ve communicated with the city’s 59 community boards and the borough presidents asking for their help identifying this civic sector and the names of neighborhoods, parks, monuments, principle streets, squares, historic sites or other geographic areas, parades, and events with the intention of setting aside matching .nyc domain names. Our Civic Names page links to these civic resources by community district.

Many of the civic sector organizations already have domain names, some of them good ones - i.e, short, descriptive, and memorable, and we do not expect them to switch to .nyc names. What we want to accomplish most immediately is to set aside appropriate domain names so that, should a civic organization or resource need a reflective .nyc name,  it will be available to them. 

Beyond these name set-asides, our Civics Project seeks to help those without an existing web presence establish  appropriate spaces within the .nyc Top Level Domain. In 2009 we will facilitate mentoring and other relationships to assist the civic sector in these areas. Updated October 5, 2008. (Commons photo courtesy of Jebb.)

Learn about and contribute to The Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages.

­­

OneWebDay is an annual event to celebrate and to protect the Internet.­­ It’s on September 22 every year. It’s a global event, but New York is its center. Here are some city events you can attend, all free.

Main Event - Monday, 9/22, from 11:45 am to 2 pm, at Washington Square Park - Moderator Sree Sreenivasan (Columbia Journalism & WNBC-TV), City Councilwoman Hon. Gale A. Brewer, plus Tim Westergren (Pandora), Prof. Lawrence Lessig (Stanford), Craig Newmark (craigslist), Dharma Dailey (Ethos Group), John Perry Barlow (EFF), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), SJ Klein (OLPC), and possibly others.

Educational Workshops - Saturday, 9/20, from 2-4 pm at NYU - Introducing New Users to New Possibilities is the theme. There will be 9 of these. See details at http://www.onewebday.org/base/index.php/2008_Workshops_Planning.

Tech Demos - Saturday9/20, from 7 pm to 9 pm, also at NYU - The Latest Tools for Online Participation in Democracy *See brief demos of exciting new applications that help ordinary folks get more involved in government and politics, and have the chance to meet their creators afterwards.

Party - Saturday, 9/20, from 9 pm - late. Come to one of the events for d­etails on its location. I went last year but learned I was too old for this Internet crowd (I’m 150.) Perhaps you’re not!.

Learn more about The Campaign on our wiki pages.

­September 8, 2008, New York - We never received a response to our requests for context information on the Economic Case for Auctions in New gTLDs paper ICANN posted on August 6 despite our Point of Information post, emails, and phone calls. The paper, written by ICANN staff and its “auctions partner” PowerAuctions LLC, concluded that an auction, not comparative evaluation, was the best means for allocating a contested city TLD.

The prevailing view has been that a comparative evaluation would discern a winner between  contesting applicants for a city TLD. And while there’s been no indication of a formal shift in ICANN policy, without an indication from the ICANN as to the paper’s purpose or status, we thought it prudent to post our thoughts on the issue prior to the September 7 posting deadline. The post presented a bleak assessment of the result of an auction between a community focused, slow growth applicant (Connecting.nyc Inc.) and a financial value bidder:

My concern is absolutely fundamental. For if the recipient of
the .nyc TLD is to be decided by auction, we will loose. And
our hope of finally having the opportunity to put the full
capabilities of the Internet - and that includes the DNS - to
address the cities current needs and future growth opportunities,
will be lost.

I concluded my comments with the following suggestions:

What the ICANN needs to do is acknowledge that there are entities
called cities. That the DNS's historic neglect of these
environmentally efficient locals, where more than ½ the earth's
population now live, must end. The ICANN needs to recognize that
cities have special needs that can be addressed by TLDs. And the
ICANN needs to establish criteria and processes for judging the
best application for this important civic resource.

This is a critical issue. And while it’s difficult to imagine that a shift of this magnitude would happen without public input - I’m still hoping the ICANN’s apparent lean toward auctions is just a vacation time, slip-through-the-cracks oversight by staff - we may need to send some enlightenment mojo to ICANN on this. So keep alert. (Commons photo courtesy of Jeremy Becker.)

Read the full comments here.    Learn more about The Campaign on our wiki pages.

­

­August 8, 2008, New York - I attended a conference on social networks here in New York City yesterday. Social networks are the latest “can’t miss” technology flooding the Internet world with services such as Facebook, Flicker, MySpace, and Twitter the recent headliners. There are more than a hundred of these companies seeking ways to connect like-mined people. According to Wikipedia:

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others.

So where does this fit with our mission? Here’s a summary of my presentation during a conference session entitled City-TLDs: Ripe for Social Networking? (Note: The meeting was held at the offices of Sun Microsystems, the “we power the internet” people. No Internet access was available ( ! ) so I had to ditch my planned presentation and wing it.)

By way of background I explained that city-TLDs will arrive in 2010 with their focus on the local. In our case, New York City has 1/10th of 1% of the world’s population living on 400 square miles of the good old earth. And while additional domain names, identity (”made in New York”), and the tourist portals are the obvious features the TLD will offer, the real advantages we hope to achieve will arrive with improved local communication. I backgounded on Connecting.nyc Inc.’s origin at a community board, revealed the sorry state of civic communication, and concluded my intro with, “What would fill the existing local communications gap is what people at this conference call social networks.”

I provided one simple example of a “social network” we here at Connecting.nyc Inc. (CnI) have been considering, the Voter Project. It begins by setting aside domain names for registered voters, e.g., using a name-set such as www.your-name.voter.nyc, and providing residents who choose to participate with tools to better locate one another so as to address opportunities and problems before the community.

At the conclusion I challenged participants to uncover the networking opportunities city-TLD’s will make available using neighborhood names (Astoria.nyc, Bensonhurst.nyc, SoHo.nyc) and issues (e.g., save-the-trees.nyc, help-us-reduce-traffic.nyc) as examples.

As my goal was to get people thinking about city-TLDs as mashable parts for creating social networks, I’d judge by the participants questions and enthusiasm that my presentation should be chalked up as a success. If you’re one of those who sat in on the session, do you agree? (Commons photo courtesy of greenem.)

See more on our social network efforts here.   Learn more about The Campaign on our wiki pages.

June 9, 2008, New York - What caused the record breaking temperature on this blistering June day? While some will undoubtedly point to global warming, we think it was the exhaust left by our energetic team (at right in City Hall Park) as they deftly distributed our Names for a Livable City flyers at the civic center this morning dressed in their souped-up Fedders AC2008XO air conditioned .nyc t-shirts.

Matt, Tom, and Jeffrey positioned themselves at the front of the Municipal Building and as flyers flew, with city employees grabbing at them like Häagen-Dazs freebies, our cool crew clouded the downtown air with the exhaust from their high tech t’s. (Our bad, sorry.)

The results from the effort were not yet available as our team headed off to Coney Island for a dip in the 63 degree Atlantic with a promise to return when the heat subsides. When completed the results will be included in in our Domain Name Allocation Plan.

Link to Connecting.nyc Inc.’s wiki pages.

June 1, 2008 - We were delighted to have the opportunity to present the case for city TLDs and .nyc to the New York chapter of the Internet Society on Wednesday, May 21. The presentation was made at the historic Jefferson Market Library branch of the New York Public Library. Mr. Lowenhaupt was introduced by David Solomanoff, president of the New York chapter.

The slide presentation laster about 35 minutes with several attendees questions answered afterward. A video of the event lasting a little over an hour was prepared by Joly MacFie. See it here. The 125 slides used in the presentation are also available on that page.

Thanks once again to the Internet Society, the New York Public Library, David Solomanoff for arranging the event, and to Joly MacFie for shooting the video.

April 2, 2008 - Acquiring the .nyc TLD promises many benefits to residents, community and civic organizations, and businesses in our great city. Some of these are quite practical while others seem to promise a nirvana. The practical include good domain names, identity, and a directory of the city’s resources. The more sublime involve the networking of neighbors, communities, and businesses into a humming nest of cooperation and accord. Some of these will succeed others won’t.

But these however-many features retain their advantage to the city (that’s all of us) only as long as the integrity of the namespace is maintained. That is, if we allow .nyc to become .com-like, with all its slime and sleaze, our TLD will become meaningless as a social, civic, and business development tool.

Hence our noble experiment. Over the next two months we will begin an exploration of possible operational, management, and oversight methodologies of the .nyc TLD. For example, is democratic management of the namespace possible? What are appropriate uses of .nyc names? Should (and can) we have a nexus (residency) requirement? Does viewing the namespace as a spectrum (FCC-like) with differing duties and responsibilities for different name categories offer advantage? And how we might recall “abused” names?

Following closely and intimately tied in with decisions on these matters are questions about governance - what processes are required to follow through on these decisions and what structure will best support the endeavor? How are board members selected and decisions made? What role and what channels are appropriate for oversight of these decisions? What is the size, composition, and selection process for the board of directors? What board advisory bodies should be created and what is their relationship with the board?

Over the next two months we will begin reaching out to city residents and Internet users worldwide for their views on these and other questions.  We don’t know our Noble Experiment. will turn out, indeed we might find that the experiences from the recently issued .eu and .ASIA TLDs provides a suitable model for .nyc. But with technology, the world, and the city changing, we thought it appropriate that we invite the opinions of all New Yorkers as to how they’d like to see this resource managed.

Our plans are nearing completion and we’ve created a dotCity wiki to house the effort. Take a look. Let us know what you think.

During Internet Week, June 3-10, we will present a preliminary report on this Noble Experiment. Join in. Help make it a fruitful endeavor.