http://Home.nyc

New York, December 13, 2009 - Connecting.nyc Inc. was a sponsor of the OpenNY Summit held at the offices of The Open Planning Project in New York City on December 11-12. One of OpenNY’s tracks focused on making city government’s raw digital information accessible to programmers. The benefits of making standards compliant data accessible became apparent after Washington D.C.’s experiment with mashups resulted in many helpful programs being developed for city residents and visitors.

Standards are a key element enabling the effective release of data and several Summit discussions touched on the issue. The standards discussion inspired Tom Lowenhaupt, Connecting.nyc Inc.’s founder, to present an impromptu talk on the opportunity standards offer for the efficient and effective development of city TLDs. There’s the 2 minute recording of the presentation on AOL Video.

Mr. Lowenhaupt became familiar with city TLD standards through his role as key drafter of the Paris Understanding, a document that would guide global cities in the direction of standards for the development and operation of city-TLDs. ­(Commons photo of Statue of Liberty being assembled in Paris from NYPL collection.)

Learn about .nyc on our wiki pages.

Mexico City, March 3, 2009 - Connecting.nyc Inc. participated at a gathering of the “dotCities movement” at the 34th Meeting of ICANN, March 2 - 6, in Mexico City.

On the opening day, several dotCity developers met to discuss their goals for the week of meetings. Those attending were Kim Jaeyoun, Seoul, South Korea, Marta Téllez i Domingo, project director of .bcn (Barcelona), Oliver Sume, .HAMBURG, Werner Staub, from CORE, Dirk Krischenowski, .berlin, Amadeau Abril i Abril, initiator, .cat, and Thomas Lowenhaupt, the.nyc TLD.

Monday’s meeting focused on the role of cities within the ICANN, the entity that oversees the Internet’s domain name structure. Current thinking is that cities will express their voice at ICANN through the Registries Constituency of the GNSO. In February 2009 promoters of the .nyc, .berlin, .bcn, and .paris submitted a petition to the GNSO, a deliberative body of the ICANN, indicating their intention to form the City Top-Level Domain Constituency and participate in the ICANN governance process from within that entity.

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

­June 25, 2008, Paris - When Deputy Mayor Jean-Louis Rissika announced at the Hôtel de ville de Paris (Paris’ City Hall) that the City of Lights was taking steps to reorganize itself for the digital age using the .PARIS TLD (like .com, .org, and .us, but just for Paris), the audience erupted in applause.

Among the 1,000+ participants that jammed themselves into the former bastion of Kings to celebrate the 32^nd meeting of the ICANN (the organization that responsible for issuing names like .paris and .nyc) was Tom Lowenhaupt, founding director of CnI. Mr. Lowenhaupt congratulated Sebastien Bachollet, president of Internet Society France and initiator of the .paris effort.

As the celebrants enjoyed the delicious food and magnificent facility, Lowenhaupt continued a discussion with Amadeu Abril i Abril, former ICANN board member and initiator of the .cat TLD (serving the needs of the Catalonian culture), about ways global cities could coordinate the development of their TLDs.

June 10, 2008 - The New York Times published an informative article about the campaign in yesterday’s paper. The article was partially based on writer Jenny 8. Lee’s attendance at Connecting.nyc Inc.’s May 13th public meeting. Be sure to read the 25+ comments posted about the article.

On November 14, 2007 Connecting.nyc participated on a Broadening the Domain Name Space: Adding TLDs for Cities and Regions panel at the U.N. sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio De Janeiro. The panel first heard about the positive experiences of three recently issued TLDs: .cat (for the Catalonia cultural), .asia (for use in the continent of Asia), and .eu (for use in the European Union).

The focus then turned to prospective TLDs with .nyc leading off the presentations. Panelist Thomas Lowenhaupt reviewed the basis for city-TLDs and recent organizing activities in support of Connecting.nyc’s application, including a recent favorable meeting with the city’s IT department. He also reiterated his concern, first raised at the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles, that a plethora of applications by Fortune 1000 firms for new TLDs might inundate the ICANN’s small staff and reduce the likelihood of city-TLDs being issued on a timely basis.

Panelist Sebastian Bacholet, appearing on behalf of the .paris TLD, reviewed the internationalization study initiated by developers of the .nyc, .berlin, and .paris TLDs at the ICANN Los Angeles meeting. He provided three instances where second level domain names might be developed in various languages - www.taxi.nyc, www.hotels.paris, and www.hospital.berlin. By way of example, he explained that when in need of health care, German or French speaking visitors to New York City might enter www.krankenhaus.nyc or www.hôpital.nyc in their respective languages and receive pages with the needed information.