http://Home.nyc

New York, January 31, 2010 - Last year 1,200 applications were submitted to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge grant and we were one of 50 finalists. They funded 9 applications, most regrettably, not ours.

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

New York, December 8, 2009 - As President Obama packs his bags for the trip to Copenhagen and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we’re taking the occasion to draw attention to one of the more important names that will arrive with the activation of the .nyc TLD - sustainable.nyc.

Take a look at our wiki page for this name and you’ll see that it, and its name cloud, can have a forceful identity and organizing impact on this vital issue. In a time when climate will gather an ever increasing share of our attention, it seems reasonable to set aside a name-set supportive of a sustainable city, around which we can exchange ideas and organize to improve our climate.

While we’re privileged to have Dr. Frans C. Verhagan on our Resident Advisory Network, providing insight guidance into these issues, the Toward a Sustainable City wiki page, and a mechanism for development and oversight of the sustainable.nyc name-set, have yet to be created. So we invite those who wish they could be in Copenhagen today to join here and contribute their thoughts to ways we might utilize the sustainable.nyc name-set in support of an improved climate. (Logo of Copenhagen host committee.) P.S. See Cap & Trade.

Learn about .nyc on our wiki pages.

New York, November 20, 2009 -The Regional Plan Association and The Open Planning Project sponsored a Participatory Planning Tech Workshop at the offices of TOPP on Friday, November 13. The event was described as follows:

Everyday social computing, mobile technology, and the adoption of web 2.0 approaches by governments have laid the groundwork for far wider citizen involvement in civic life.  Citizens can now be involved earlier on, more frequently, and in more meaningful ways than was ever possible before.  How can these opportunities be leveraged for use in the city planning space?  What are the technologies that will make this possible?  What are the bureaucratic, logistical, or social issues that need to be addressed in considering these ideas?  What tools could we build — today — that would be the most impactful?

Seventy technologists and urban planners attended. Additional information about this first of many meetings on the subject is available from here.

Connecting.nyc made a presentation on the impact the .nyc TLD could have in tagging city resources and creating a programmer-friendly city. That presentation is available for download here. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress.)

New York, November 1, 2009 - We recently received notice from the Committee for Open Fashion NYC, organizer of Fashion Camp 2009, requesting that the fashion.nyc domain name be reserved for use by New York City’s fashion industry. The Committee recommended that fashion.nyc:

• Should present a complete and unbiased directory of the city’s fashion industry.
• Care should be taken to assure that suitable control is exercised over those listed in the directory to assure that they are indeed city businesses.
• That FASHION.NYC serve as a means to locate fashion resources beneficial to the city’s fashion industry – suppliers, manufacturers, designers, fashion houses, and students.
• That a simple fill-in form providing a webpage for new entrants into the fashion industry, e.g., www.fashion.nyc/newcompany, be made available.

The Committee for Open Fashion NYC is exploring FASHION.NYC’s content, business model, and governance structure. We have offered to assist the Committee with its explorations as part of our quest for models for other important city portals.

Learn more about fashion.nyc at Open Fashion’s .nyc’s website or see our fashion.nyc wiki page.

Jackson Hts., New York, June 1, 2009 - I attended the 59th Sidney Hillman Foundation awards ceremony honoring journalists, writers, and public figures whose work fosters social and economic justice last Wednesday. It was a most exhilarating evening, with the recipients having made significant contributions to our awareness of the world around us.

Reflecting the times, Bruce Raynor, president of the Hillman Foundation and the evening’s moderator, at one point bemoaned the seeming demise of our nation’s daily newspapers and asked “How will those communities exist without the ongoing contributions of those fine journalists?”

Living with about 100,000 other residents in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, where we’ve never known the luxury of a daily newspaper (nor a TV or radio station) focused on our problems and the opportunities before us, I can provide at least a partial answer to Mr. Raynor:

• All too often they’ll have to wait for a disaster to occur before anyone pays attention to a local problem.
  
• Local communication will be very slow and incomplete, with word of mouth assuming a more important role.
• Community memory will be short, incomplete, and inaccurate.
  
• Election processes will be ineffective as they’ll have few mechanisms for reporting on activities, issues, and assessing accountability. 
• Faith in government and the governance processes will diminish as will the quality of life.
  

With the rise of the Net and the broad demise of the traditional newspaper industry, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see a printed daily in Jackson Heights or in any of our city’s other neighborhoods. Perhaps there’s the germ of a new media in our  dotNeighborhoods and Issue-Communities efforts that might enable useful citizen reporting and accountability mechanisms. But for the moment, sans a new business model, the ability of either to conjure up quality journalism remains elusive.

However, Mr. Raynor did perhaps provide one part of the answer when he announced the Sidneys “a new monthly award for an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism from a newspaper, magazine, web site, or any broadcast outlet. The award citation will come with $500 and a bottle of union-made wine.”

We’ll be scheduling another meeting on dotNeighborhoods later this month where this issue will be on the agenda. (Commons photo courtesy johncarney.) 

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

­New York City, April 27, 2009 - The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) in preparation for the acquisition of the .nyc TLD (like .com and .org but just for New York City). We applaud this outreach effort and request that all members of Connecting.nyc’s community join us in assembling a comprehensive body of information to assist the city with this important policy development effort.

Over the next weeks we will gather and organize information that might aide the city’s decision making process. (Due date May 27th.) With our public interest perspective, decade-long involvement with .nyc, and the collaboration of our community, we expect that our submission will assist the city in better understanding the multitude of ways .nyc can help create a more prosperous and livable city.

We will augment our submission by including information presented on a collaborative wiki we’ve created, see RFI Workspace. The Workspace links to the abundance of information on Connecting.nyc Inc.’s wiki, and enables our community to help create an imaginative and innovative assemblage of ideas for the city’s consideration. We are particularly interested in ways the TLD might facilitate security and privacy. As well, we’d like to hear how .nyc can help connect New York City’s civic, social, and business communities using networking tools.

Going forward, we expect DoITT to review the various RFI submissions and, in collaboration with city agencies, business & civic organizations, and residents, to develop a road map leading to .nyc’s acquisition, development, operation, and oversight. (Image elements courtesy Google Maps.)

Learn more about our RFI Collaboration. 

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

­­­New York, January 24, 2009 - How will the arrival of the .nyc TLD change civic communication and the governance structure in New York City? Since 1975 our official “divisioning” has been steady: 1 city, 5 boroughs, 51 council districts, and 59 community districts. To date, the Net has not had an impact. Will it? If so, how and when?

With Connecting.nyc Inc.’s .nyc initiative having evolved from Queens Community Board 3’s 2001 Internet Empowerment Resolution, thinking about the TLD’s role and impact on civic affairs has been a constant. Over the past few months, as the probability of the TLDs arrival has grown larger, we’ve begun to focus on the .nyc TLD’s impact on this now 35 year old structure.

Neighborhood domain names have always been seen as valuable civic resources, enabling those amorphous entities to better provide local identify, communication, and broker the effective sharing of local responsibilities and opportunities. We recently created a Traditional Neighborhood Names page to discuss the possibilities and ways we might allocate names such as astoria.nyc, bushwick.nyc, and greenwich-village.nyc, and how we might assure their operation in the interest of local residents.

In early November we submitted an application to the Knight Foundation outlining an entirely new civic structure, something we called Issue-Communities. Using mapping software and social networking tools, Issue-Communities will empower city residents to create narrow communities of interest - “Issue-Communities” - reflecting their concerns. These Issue-Communities can address longstanding local communications deficits and serve as organizing force to focus local concerns.

Recently we began seeing overlaps and parallels in the Traditional Neighborhoods and Issue-Communities projects, and today created a wiki page for thinking through the development of such New Civic Governance Layers. Join us.

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

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­New York City, December 22, 2008 - The first time I heard­ Abbot and Costello do their “Who’s on first?” routine about baseball player names I was 7 years old and delighted at the comedy duo’s banter. Here’s a sampling:

­­­Costello: Look Abbott, if you’re the coach, you must know all the players.

Abbott: I certainly do. 

Costello: Well you know I’ve never met the guys. So you’ll have to tell me their names, and then I’ll know who’s playing on the team.

­Abbott: Oh, I’ll tell you their names, but you know it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names.

Costello: You mean funny names? 

Abbot: Dizzy Dean… 

Costello: His brother Daffy.

Abbott: Daffy Dean 

Costello: And their French cousin.

Abbott: French?

Costello: Goofè.

Abbott: Goofè Dean. Well, let’s see, on the bags we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Dont Know is on third…

Costello: That’s what I want to find out.

Abbott: I say Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Dont Know is on third…

And on and on they went. Sans the above diagram, this classic comedy of confusion demonstrates the importance of appropriate naming.

Some are saying that last week saw another classic as the NTIA & DOJ KO’d ICANN’s gTLD RFP( see the NTIA document here) with many now holding their breath, hoping the Obama Administration intervenes, saving the extant RFP. I don’t think TLDs will be a 100 day priority and that only after there’s a sign of stability in the economy will the new administration’s focus turn to TLDs. (The FDIC also opined caution.)

So after reading the comments filed about the draft RFP, and finding the preponderance of objections directed at business (ab)uses by new TLDs, I began to wonder if perhaps there’s an interim path to issuing TLDs. Can we advance the ICANN’s mission, take advantage of the work the GNSO and others have undertaken, and test the new TLD apparatus without tripping over some possibly meritorious business community objections? To help think through the options, I created the below table differentiating three categories of TLDs and several issues associated with their allocation and introduction.

TLD  Category	Consumer & Brand Protection	Morality & Public Order	ICANN Processing Strain	Excess Auction Revenue	Negation Points
dot-Cities	Minor	Minor	Minor	None	3
dot-Corporate	Moderate	Minor	Major	Minor ­­	7
dot-Generic	Major	Major	Major	Major	12

­­­Negation Points: None = 0, Minor = 1, Moderate = 2, Major = 3

As we enter the new year, perhaps we might consider separating city TLDs (and perhaps cultural groups) from the crowd so that cities may begin using the Net’s DNS to help address their multitude of needs. Perhaps we can encourage Obama’s Office of Urban Affairs to take notice and extricate city-TLDs from the NTIA  & DOJ tar pit. (Updated 12/23/08.) (Commons photo courtesy of Naccarato.)

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

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­­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.

There are a plethora of advantages that arise with having a city TLD. If you’re a small business person, you might find a good domain name to be the best advantage. If your a prospective visitor, directory pages like www.hotels.nyc or www.tours.nyc might offer the maximum benefit. The intuitive Internet and the resulting more navigable city might provide residents with the most apparent everyday advantage.

But the real value that arises with the .nyc TLD is a more secure and trustworthy city. We’ve only begun to explore this in our wiki’s identity section, but the heart of our contribution to a greater New York will be found there.

Join us there, or elsewhere on the wiki, to help imagine New York City’s space on the internet and its future.