http://Home.nyc

­New York, February 22­, 2010 - We submitted a somewhat indelicate proposal to the Minds in the Gutter competition on February 15, 2010. The competition was predicated on the following statement:

“Every time it rains in New York City, our combined sewer system gobbles up stormwater running off all hard surfaces - roadways, sidewalks, rooftops and parking lots - into the same network of pipes that carry our sewage. This system quickly reaches capacity, and the stormwater and sewage overflow into local waterways on the order of 27 billion gallons per year. This limits how New Yorkers can safely access the waterfront, and impairs our estuary ecosystem.”

While the competition was looking for solutions to the sewerage overflow problem from the field of civil engineering (e.g., enabling rain water to seep into the gutter and become groundwater), we saw an opportunity to point out how computer engineering could address the problem. Our solution combined a careful Internet of Things development of the toilets.nyc domain name with civic crowdsourcing. With our test project focused on cleaning Flushing Bay, we entitled our proposal The Flushing Community. See it here.

Being non-compliant with a strict reading of the guidelines, we’re hoping for an “outsider” or “best effort” award from S.W.I.M. judges. (Commons image courtesy of Patti Lowenhaupt and S.W.I.M.)

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page.

New York, January 27, 2010 - One of the better public interest websites is in deep trouble Idealist.org. If you’re not familiar with it take a look now.

Idealist has always been a great place for those looking for help with civic and community issues, for jobs, events, and a lot more. We regularly post notices of our meeting there. Idealist receives most of its income from these job notices and got hit hard by the recession. Today I received a note from Ami Dar, its founder, which said:

“Very briefly, here’s what happened. Over the past ten years, most of our funding has come from the small fees we charge organizations for posting their jobs on Idealist. By September 2008, after years of steady growth, these little drops were covering 70% of our budget.

Then, in October of that year, the financial crisis exploded, many organizations understandably froze their hiring, and from one week to the next our earned income was cut almost in half, leaving us with a hole of more than $100,000 each month.”

If you can help please go to http://www.idealist.org/donate and do so.

Tom Lowenhaupt

New York, August 28, 2009 - New York City’s voters approved a city charter amendment in 1988 that required publishing a Public Data Directory detailing the city’s “computerized information.”

In 1993 the first, and so far only, edition of the Public Data Directory was published with details of 300 or so databases. In recent weeks we’ve been working with the NYC Open Government Coalition to help make a digital version of the paper Directory available. The thinking is that many of the databases still exist and that this will be a starting point for a more robust detailing of current city databases.

The preponderance of the technology for the conversion was developed by the Transparency Corps, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, and New York City’s civil society catalyst The Open Planning Project.

The multi-step conversion process first scanned the Directory’s 156 pages into digital images. Next, these now digitized “pages” were read by an OCR program (Optical Character Recognition) which converted the digital images into computer readable characters. We’re now on the third step which requires two human inputs: 1.) copy the OCR text and paste it into the appropriate data fields, and 2.) with OCR delivering only 99% accuracy (e.g., it doesn’t do well differentiating a g and a q), after pasting you’ve got to compare if it accurately represents what was in the printed Directory, making any necessary corrections. The correct interpretation is not always obvious so each page is served and interpreted several times with a Levenshtein algorithm deciding on the correct version. The Transparency Corps has added a modicum of pleasure by incorporating a game-like scoring feature.

Visit the site and help make some of the conversions, each takes about 5 minutes. With the small commitment of time, this is an excellent example of an appropriate wiki task. 25% of the tasks were completed as of September 7, 91% on November 1.

When you’re done, go to our Internet of Things page and help imagine ways we might collaborate to wring more benefits out of the city’s databases and other ‘things.’ 

Learn more about .nyc on our 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.

June 5, 2008, New York - On Monday morning we’re going to reach out to the public, particularly to city employees, to suggest intuitive .nyc domain names we should reserve to help create a more livable city: names such as mayor.nyc and, dare we say, towed-vehicles.nyc. See the official notice about this and the many other Internet Week events.

Our supporters will be at major city office facilities inviting city employees to send good domain names our way. Everyone’s suggestions are welcomed.

When: June 09, 08:00 AM — 10:00 AM

Where: City Hall … Municipal Building … 250 Broadway

We need volunteers to help man these and possibly other sites - depending upon how many volunteers are available. Email tom@connectingnyc.org if you have a few minutes to spare and want to greet city worker with a smiling face saying, “Got ideas for good city domain names? Check it out. ” and hand them a small piece of paper. Volunteers will receive a free .nyc T-Shirt. (See the event organizing page here.)

Ready to help rethink the Internet as a civic tool to create a better New York City for its residents and organizations?

As the new semester approaches, we invite those with a feel for the future, the ability to imagine a better city, and capable of working with a good deal of independence to join our campaign to acquire and develop the .nyc TLD.

A few of the areas where we can use help are governance (TLD oversight, not-for-profit board structuring ), marketing (strategic plan, materials design), media creation ( web design, video, database, newsletter), law (Internet, NYS, NTIA, contracts, domain name allocation plan, dispute resolution policy), finance, community organizing, and network design. Send indications of interest to Thomas Lowenhaupt. (Creative Commons picture courtesy of Jeff Lerner.)