And I should really head over to Hunter College and see if I can get the Graduate School of Urban Affairs to do a follow-up on the dotNeighborhoods report they did last year. Or NYU’s ITP for someone to imagine the role of a TLD in a location based world (or redo our web presence).

Or maybe I could send a posting to London and have a student at the School of Economics check my fantasy of a trusted TLD making .nyc a preferred shopping space on the net. Or of the role of a city-TLD as a common pool resource

Moving locally, I really must get to the local schools and have them begin putting OpenStreetMap.org projects on their agenda, data that will fit nicely on NYCwiki.org. 

But it’s 95 degrees (35 Celsius) here in NYC and I’m closing shop for the day. One final note: We are very receptive of independent student proposals.

                                                                                         Tom Lowenhaupt

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page

As the ICANN moves closer to issuing city TLDs, a few cities have publicly shown an interest in their acquisition and development - Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, New York - with several others  in contemplation. But most remain unaware of the economic benefits and improved quality of life a thoughtfully developed city TLD can provide.

To date, the few cities with an announced interest have developed their plans in camera, without public or inter-city consultation. The City TLD workshop was organized to shine a global light on the opportunities provided by the digital infrastructure enabled by city TLDs. It is hoped that the dialog will facilitate information sharing policies and processes that will result in more efficient, governable, and livable cities.

The IGF was created by the United Nations’ Secretary-General to help carry out the World Summit on the Information Society mandate to convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on Internet governance.  The workshop was proposed by Connecting.nyc and developed in consultation with the Internet Governance Caucus and the IGF.

The City TLD Governance and Best Practices workshop will be held in Room 6 of the LITEXPO Center on Friday, September 17, from 2:30 to 4:30 PM Vilnius time. New Yorkers can participate in the event via a remote connection beginning at 8:30 AM on the 17th. Details on the connection process will be provided as they become available. Connecting.nyc Inc. will be represented on the workshop by its founding director, Thomas Lowenhaupt. If you have questions or comments for the workshop, you may email them to him at tom@connectingnyc.org.

For more on the IGF, and the background, content, and participants in the workshop see this wiki page.

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page

The Prize .nyc is an annual award given to the person or organization that has contributed most to the technology that facilitated the .nyc TLD’s advancement over the past year.

Connecting.nyc Inc.’s wiki and blog run on the open-source CoActivate software originally developed by The Open Planning Project, now OpenPlans. Ethan worked on CoActivate for several years while at OpenPlans. In May 2010 OpenPlans transferred management control of CoActivate to Ethan. Whether your group is mobilizing voters, planning a protest, or growing a garden, CoActivate can help you become more effective. CoActivate is about greasing the wheels of democracy.

The photo above shows the Prize.nyc award dinner at the original Nathans in Coney Island. Shown are Ethan Jucovy, honored guest Jackie Arasi, and Connecting.nyc Inc.’s founding director Tom Lowenhaupt. The consensus among the celebrants was that the hot dogs were best, followed by a close tie by the french fries and beer.

See the Prize.nyc for previous winners and for the process to submit a nomination for Prize.nyc 2011.(Photo by Patti Lowenhaupt)

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page

­

Governors Island, New York, July 24, 2010 - Connecting.nyc Inc. hosted a table at the City of Water Day Festival on Governors Island today. The event, organized by the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, is “a day of entertainment, education, and adventure for all to celebrate the potential of our waterfront.”

Our decision to participate in City of Water Day was influenced by two “name” events. The first was reading a New York Times story about a woman complaining that the Bronx River and other city water bodies were either not identified accurately or at all on the new subway map.

The Times story brought to mind a comment that Assembly Member Jeffrion Aubry of East Elmhurst made several years ago at a public hearing. A developer had requested the community board’s OK to remove a huge boulder that stood in the way of a proposed new hotel near LaGuardia Airport. Jeffrion, nearly three score at that point, noted that a stream passed the beloved boulder when he was a kid (Killy Pond they called it) into which he and his friends would jump.

These two water-name events led us to think about how city water bodies could be further identified and developed with good domain names, like BronxRiver.nyc. So we set up our table on a most glorious day and asked City of Water Day celebrants on Governors Island to provide names of  city water resources that we might reserve. See our City of Water Names wiki page for the responses we received and where you enter other water names. Of the many names offered, everyone’s favorite was Dead Horse Cove.

If we can think of a more engaging presentation we might again table next year. But it was a gem of an event and those manning the table agreed that more-fun less-work should be the rule for City of Water Day 2011. For example, did you ever think about riding on a fire boat while it shoots its water cannons? City of Water Day provides the opportunity to fulfill such youthful dreams. Look for me on the fire boat next summer.

After research and experimentation we concluded that the Mediawiki software that provides the foundation for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects, would satisfy our needs for the pilot project. The Internet Society’s Joly MacFie has graciously offered to oversee the installation, hosting, and operation of the software.

Connecting.nyc Inc.’s founder arranged to have Jackson Heights designated the first Neighborhood of the Week agreeing to help drive some of his neighbors to the Jackson Heights section of the NYCwiki as we experiment with content, design, moderation, and other issues. In a few weeks, with some early content on the site,  Wikimedia will sponsor an education session in Jackson Heights for those unfamiliar with editing a wiki.

The next Neighborhood of the Week will be Harlem.

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page

New York is a young city, founded 400 years ago. We need to take a “city view” of the .nyc TLD, planning for how it will serve the needs of residents 10, 20, and 100 years from now.  ­How do we plan and create policies that will assure that the .nyc TLD serves us for the life of the TLD? Doing so takes us into the realm of sustainability.

The desirability and necessity of creating sustainable cities and a sustainable planet are acknowledged by everyone these days. While we’ve given some thought to the role of a .city TLD in sustaining a city, we now need to think about how we might create a sustainable city TLD. The .com TLD, stretched to the breaking point, provides excellent examples of  “recycling” that enables limited name reuse via pricing (non-renewals), wait lists, auctions, and of course, the magic of the market.  But are these mechanisms adequate for a city view?

Join us as we begin a conversation about developing policies to assure .nyc effectively serves our city for the life of the DNS. (Image courtesy of Patti Lowenhaupt.)

Learn more about our overall effort from our Wiki Home Page

This will happen as the ICANN, the entity that issues new Top Level Domains such as .com, .org, and .gov finalizes the application process for new TLDs. There will initially be hundreds and then thousands of New  TLDs, with names such as .bank, .sport, and .news.

So the future holds Chase and Citibank moving from Chase.com and citibank.com to Chase.bank and city.bank. ESPN will move to ESPN.sports and the Wall Street Journal will find advantage in moving to WSJ.news.

With this transition people will come to see the Internet as far more intuitive than today and will begin entering their domain name requests directly. So for example, if you’re looking for a bank you might enter index.bank or directory.bank. Or if you’re looking for news you might try categories.news. And information about baseball might be best found from baseball.sports. It’s going to be a different Internet, one where our dependence of search engines will be diminished.

In addition to the forementioned .sport, .news, and .bank, there will be city TLDs such as .paris, .berlin, .tokyo and our favorite .nyc.

Let’s imagine the .nyc Top Level Domain name is fully functional in 5 years. And people have begun to recognize the benefit of directly entering domain names rather than always relying on Google. And people learn that it’s faster and more direct to enter mayor.nyc, citycouncil.nyc, firedepartment.nyc, and police.nyc.

The .nyc TLD’s name server (a specialized computer) will connect each of these queries to the appropriate website and create an entry in a Query Log. This Query Log will contain valuable information from a marketing, governance, and civic life perspective.

Let me give an example. Imagine in 1985 we had the intuitive Internet as I’ve described above, i.e., baseball.sports, police.nyc… And imagine the residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn started entering inquiries into their search boxes such as:

• Holeintree.nyc
• Spottedbeetles.nyc
• Dyingtreesingreenpoint.nyc

What happens to these queries? If they’re for an existing website, people will be directly connected to the site. (Let’s skip for the moment the privacy issues associated with that database of successful connections - the basis for the Sylla & Charybdis graphic.)

But imagine it’s a time like 1985 when the Asian Longhorn Beetle had just arrived on our shores. And residents of Greenpoint are entering intuitive inquiries like the above seeking information about the strange developments going on with their trees. And let’s assume that none of these intuitive inquiries had existing websites. What happens to these erroneous queries?

We advocate that this information go to an Error Query Log Database, and be made available to all for inspection. This will enable some clever researcher to begin exploring these entries and initiate a proper response. In 1985 that would have been to inform the Parks Department that something odd was going on with the trees in Greenpoint, and to dispatch an inspector to investigate. In reality, it took 10 years before that happened and America now faces the prospect of 1,200,000,000 trees being lost to the Asian Longhorn Beetle. ­

So what will the Error Query Log show in the future?

We don’t have that crystal ball, but it could be the central location for sensing change in our city, a twitteresque database controlled by the city. As such, we recommended in testimony before the city council Technology Committee on June 19, 2010 considering Intro. 29, OpenData, that the Error Query Log Database be made available to researchers and programmers on a minute by minute or minimally, hourly basis.

Read our testimony and help imagine the development of this twitteresque feature. (Commons image courtesy of Wikimedia.)

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

WikiNeighborhoods is a collaboration between Wikimedia New York City, The Internet Society of New York, and Connecting.nyc. It is an extension of our dotNeighborhoods initiative creating content for locally run websites for each of New York City’s neighborhoods. It will test the “wiki model”, as seen in Wikipedia/Wikimedia projects and a growing number of city wiki efforts.

WikiNeighborhoods will collaboratively document New York City’s neighborhoods and provide new avenues of civic cooperation and engagement for city residents. The project will initially develop  resources for 10 neighborhoods, 2 for each of the five boroughs. Project planning is taking place at Wikiversity with initial implementation using a .org domain, e.g., nyc-neighborhoods.org. Finally with .nyc’s activation, the dotNeighborhoods will move to their permanent sites - Astoria.nyc, BrooklynHeights.nyc, GreenwichVillage.nyc, Harlem,nyc. Jackson Heights.nyc, etc.

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. It invites teachers, students, and researchers to join in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities. 

The Internet Society-NY is the local branch of the global Internet Society, an independent international nonprofit organization founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy around the world.

Develop a dotNeighborhood using the wiki method.

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

New York, May 26, 2010 - On October 3, 2009 the NYC Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) issued a Request for Proposals for “services to obtain, manage, administer, maintain and market the geographic Top Domain name .nyc”.

The New York Chapter of the Internet Society has followed the .nyc TLD acquisition process for several years and on May 8, 2010 hosted a seminar “dot nyc – How are we doing?” The symposium was held at NYU and moderated by Joly MacFie, Secretary of the New York Chapter.

NYC Council Member Gale Brewer delivered the keynote and then took questions. In her opening remarks CM Brewer made several points including the following:

• There’s a public process at ICANN and there’s a public process, we would like to say, before it goes to ICANN.
• What we are interested in at the city council is what does the city of New York get out of it. We are desperate for revenue. And we are interested in what public input goes into an ICANN proposal. And certainly we would like to have at the very least a public-private partnership, not just a private.­
• And the other advantage to doing a public process with a sign off and resolution from the city council is that it makes it a stronger application at ICANN. That makes a huge difference.

After her comments CM Brewer took several questions.

Q. Joly MacFie - ICANN has said that you are going to have to show that you have to show support from the community and this means that you have to have a resolution from the council. Obviously the mayor is the administrator, he’s got to present that to the council.

A. CM Brewer - Absolutely. I think that would be the time to figure out what the city gets out of it. What the public gets out of it.

Q. Joly MacFie - I think before then there should be process. DoITT should say we have a bunch of proposals, they are all very interesting, there are these issues, have a public hearing on those issues, it might be Council Member Garodnick’s Telecommunications committee, and from that make a secondary call for proposals, a second sound of things, before we go ahead.

A. CM Brewer - I would agree, and then you have a second round of criteria. Based on the public input.

Q. Tom Lowenhaupt (Director, Connecting.nyc Inc.) - The ICANN requires a letter of support from the local governing authority. I’ve always thought the city council served that role…

A. CM Brewer - I don’t know the answer to that question. We’ll have to have that researched. This is something that will be extremely controversial if it’s not done with some public input. I think politically, I don’t know about legally, that would count as the city council and the administration. Politically from DoITT’s perspective, this is not something that will affect just the administration. This will have huge impact on business, on nonprofits and everybody in New York. Everyone. So I would assume they would want to have public hearings on it, politically.  It would be crazy to have something go to ICANN without public input. I think they’ll see it that way.

Q. Tom Lowenhaupt - Do you think at this point the Technology Committee is the more appropriate one?

A. CM Brewer - Technology, Small Business, there are a lot of joint hearings at this point, trying to get more participation. At least two committees will have hearings. I will attend all of them. I will write a letter to DoITT after today’s hearing asking for updates and send you all copies, asking for public hearings on whatever committees that need to be part of this. The new commissioner Carol Post comes from the mayor’s office of operations. She’s very open. She understands that it’s very important to get public input. She’s very close to the administration, so she’s not afraid of bucking them.

Q. Joly MacFie - It seems like there is some type of process that if we got a proposal together and brought it to the Community Boards to say we like this idea.

­A. CM Brewer - Yes. I think Community Boards would be very interested in a community .nyc because they want to highlight the businesses in the neighborhood. Absolutely.

After Council Member Brewer concluded the Q&A, Eric Brunner-Williams of CORE Internet Council of Registrars, the only vendor to participate in the day’s events, presented details of CORE’s proposal. 

Finally, there was a discussion “What’s it for?” about possible applications – civic, community, commercial, and “outside the box” for a city-TLD. Speakers included Tom Lowenhaupt of Connecting.nyc Inc. (CNI) and Richard Knipel of Wikimedia NYC.

Lowenhaupt spoke of his long involvement with .nyc leading to the creation of Connecting.nyc in 2006. He presented his vision of governance for the TLD based on the model of the city’s cable TV public access channels, and described two recent efforts: The Flushing Community and dotNeighborhoods that point the way toward .nyc operating as a community TLD. After describing the dotNeighborhoods project, he introduced Richard Knipel who described a research project Wikimedia NYC will be undertaking in support of dotNeighborhoods this summer.

For more on the Symposium, including a video and stills, see this Internet Society page.

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

­

­­­­­­New York, April 19, 2010 - 9 years ago ­today Queens Community Board 3 passed the Internet Empowerment Resolution calling for the acquisition of the .nyc TLD and its development as a public interest resource. Back then the world was aware of the value of domain names as marketing tools. Our Resolution initiated thinking about the potential of city-TLDs within the realms of community building, civic governance, and economic development.

Today, in the commercial realm, the value of good marketing names - those that are short, descriptive, and memorable - continues to rise. There’s no S.E.C. overseeing name sales, and many question the “truthiness” of some claimed prices, but the Top 10 List at right, from shoutmeloud.com, is representative of similar domain name sale lists. The lottery-like increase in name sale prices, from an original $10 to $100 paid in the mid-1990s to millions today, have speculators drooling over city-TLDs. And I’m often asked about the prices I expect to see for .nyc names: Will there be big winners like in .com?

When and how much?­

Within the realm of city-TLDs we’re just on the cusp of learning their utility and value and will only know for sure when city-TLDs go live. The issuance process has moved at the speed of a pitch drop, but I think we’re getting close. My estimate is that ICANN finalizes the new TLD application process by year’s end, receives new TLD applications in 2011, with some city-TLDs going live in 2012.

So what will .nyc names be worth? There’s potentially bad news for the gambling types in that our Domain Name Allocation Plan points the way to a name distribution process that might avoid a .com-like speculative boom, and put most speculative wins into education and other digital inclusion projects. And there’s growing recognition amongst city leaders of its utility.

But there is reason to believe that some quite valuable domain names will arrive with the .nyc TLD. We stumbled upon the first of these through an odd turn of events that led us to participate in the Minds in the Gutter competition. To understand this, I need to provide some background.

The Clean Water Act of 1972

Every time it rains in New York City, our combined sewer system gobbles up stormwater running off hard surfaces - roadways, sidewalks, rooftops, and parking lots - and directs it into the same network of pipes that carry our raw (toilet) sewage. When it rains the processing plants quickly reach capacity and the stormwater and raw sewage flow untreated 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. The Clean Water Act of 1972 solidified the nation’s commitment to clean its river, bay, and ocean waters and New York has sought to comply with the law and find solutions to its stormwater problem ever since.

But while we’ve made progress, we’ve not been able to meet the Act’s requirements and the city faces stiff fines and the prospect of building two huge stormwater holding tanks to meet the clean water standards. Minds in the Gutter was one of many efforts seeking  civil engineering solutions to this problem. Its focus was on ways to stop stormwater from reaching the sewers via solutions like porous streets that would enable rain to become ground water.

In my years on Community Board 3 I’d participated on its Flushing Bay Committee which sought solutions to the stormwater and other bay problems. When I saw the Minds in the Gutter announcement the gray matter bubbled and I thought - Might the .nyc TLD play a role in solving this problem? Is there a software engineering solution that might match or better traditional civil engineering solutions?

So I tried to imagine a solution that would use the Net and civic spirit - the core of the advances we hope to achieve with a city-TLD. What we submitted was a proposal that uses crowdsourcing to connect residents, their toilets, and the weather to stop this pollution at its source. It was built around a mundane domain name that describes something universal in our city: toilets.nyc. For the proposal’s raw details see The Flushing Community wiki page. And to get a first look at the summary presentation of our software / social / community engineering plan, come to its unveiling at the Museum of the City of New York on Thursday, April 22, 6:30 PM.

About that $2.3 billion

If our Flushing Community proposal proves totally successful, that is, residents city-wide participate in the “Flushing Community,” and this succeeds cleansing our sewerage system enough to comply with Clean Water Act standards, constructing those two huge stormwater retention tanks would not be necessary. And thus, the toilets.nyc domain name would save the city the expense of building them - that’s a $2,300,000,000 saving. See the city’s Stormwater Management Plan here.

The challenge is creating a city-wide Flushing Community. How do we do that?

Shift Day

There are many instances where city residents have joined to make significant change. In the past few decades I’ve joined and/or cheered my fellow residents in picking up after our dogs, recycling garbage, and most recently, not smoking in bars and restaurants. In the instance of the Flushing Community, the rewards are money in our pockets (that $2.3 billion) and clean swimmable waters. And the cost are negligible. If it’s beneficial and relatively easy to do, precedent says we’ll do it.

The trick is creating awareness, simplicity of participation,  and community. (And a down side is that in this instance we won’t have an effective force of law behind the effort, as we did in the developments cited above.) We can’t do it without creating a voluntary and broad community of Flushing New Yorkers who recognize and act in the common interest.

The beauty of toilets.nyc is that it would be part of Shift Day - that glorious day when we switch from the old .com Net to the new local .nyc Net. It will be a day when there’s universal awareness of the great change. On that day neighborhood names, small business names, subway station names, street names, government service names, and hundreds of other aspects of our existence will suddenly shift into digital accessibility via our more organized and intuitive .nyc Internet. Within that Shift, New Yorkers will be enlightened to the size and connectivity of our .nyc community (we’re only 1/10th of 1% of the world’s population and we need to work together to thrive). If the .nyc TLD is thoughtfully introduced, on Shift Day we’ll be able to generate civic pride, awareness, and a willingness to participate in a common sacrifice and common good, such as the Flushing Community.

[Alternately, we might just buy a name like toilets.com for a few hundred K and build the Flushing Community upon it. But the cost of building civic spirit around that single effort would be substantial, and drawn out. And it would eliminate one building block of Shift Day, which will happen for better or for worse. The more and firmer the blocks the better the foundation.]

If toilets.nyc is worth $2.3 billion, what’s the value of the .nyc TLD?

Within the realm of Internet of Things there are a few hundred possibilities for other valuable names. However, the value is only realized when woven into the city’s social or infrastructure fabric, and no one’s yet evaluated these names.

And the value realized from using .nyc to create a trusted economic zone, where the world feels safe doing business, is totally unknown. So too is the value of the neighborhood names, which will provide good local communication for the first time; and my favorite, voters.nyc. How do you put a dollar value on improved community and governance? I’ve not calculated that, other than to say - a whole lot. But I promise to return 9 years from now (Pitchdrop is my middle name) with a more definitive answer.

The key point we’d like to make on this 9th anniversary of the Internet Empowerment Resolution is that toilets.nyc is just one domain name. Let’s ponder, dream, think, study, explore, and research about the entire set of domain names that will arrive with the .nyc TLD and make sure Shift Day is one we will all benefit from in a thousand ways.

Learn more about our overall effort. Start at our Wiki Home Page.

­­­­­­­­

I’ve been interested in making the governance process more “game-ish” for nearly a decade - ever since we invited Community District 3’s 200,000 residents to our feature-rich website in 2001 and no one came. (Or more precisely, there was minuscule use of its interactive features.) I concluded then that only when more “fun” was built into the governance process could we expect to compete with the richness of life’s other offerings and engage more residents in public sector activities. So Anhil’s MMORPG.gov title had me running to the ITP.

The project he outlined would broadcast technical or policy questions to the masses using Twitter, with games to be developed - by the likes of the smarties at ITP - to consolidate / appraise / rate the responses. It’s an interesting idea, and with the right interface, filters and manipulation gadgets, “players” might become engaged, follow up, and create civic value. We’ll follow this closely.

Last year we discussed the features and advantages a game-friendly .nyc TLD platform might offer, but barely moved the ball up field. Today we throw the dice and reach out for players to help write the rules that will make our virgin .nyc TLD into a gaming platform. First up on April 27 is a preliminary planning session on SecondLife’s  Democracy Island, with a kickoff face2face during the May 24-27 Games for Change Festival.

For details on the scheduling and substance of those meetings, see our Games and the .nyc TLD wiki page.

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

Mr. Sha noted his early interest in Internet Governance, observing that he was the first to raise the issue of Internet Governance at the U.N. By way of background, and perhaps responding to some suspicion arising from his former position as China’s Ambassador to the U.N., Mr. Sha emphasized that today he speaks as a U.N. employee.

After these brief comments Mr. Sha read a six page statement about the process that might lead to the IGF’s continuation, interspersed with personal observations. In my role as reporter, I’ve transcribed portions of Mr. Sha’s report, beginning on page 3, after the IGF history notation, under the heading “How The Review Process Will Unfold.”

After his prepared statement, Mr. Sha took comments from Yemen, EU, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Canada, U.S., U.K., France, Norway, ICC and then offered some concluding statements. See the full meeting report here.

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

“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 images courtesy of Patti Lowenhaupt and S.W.I.M.)

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

The meeting began with a project overview from Connecting.nyc Inc.’s (CnI) executive director, followed by a report from the Hunter College Urban Affairs Workshop on their “Case Study: Neighborhoods in a Digital Era.” Their research focused on three areas: Identity, Content, and Governance. Read Hunter’s Executive Summary and download the full document details from here.

Discussion followed with many suggestions and opinions expressed. As the meeting neared its conclusion, it was noted that while city hall has seen the wisdom of reserving the neighborhood domain names, it was not clear, should the current direction prevail, what it will take to have them released and developed in the public interest.

At the previous meeting it was suggested that an independent Ad Hoc group be formed to facilitate the dotNeighborhood’s development. Thomas Lowenhaupt, CnI executive director, reported that he’d had discussions about the formation of an independent organization and that legal assistance was available. He suggested that a statement of principles regarding the role and responsibilities of the dotNeighborhoods be drafted, refined, and endorsed by supporters via an Ad Hoc dotNeighborhood Trust. And that this statement of principles be refined and passed on to the City Council and Mayor. All agreed.

Following the meeting a draft “dotNeighborhoods Proclamation” was published on CnI’s wiki. With this post we invite public comment on that draft document. After wide circulation, comments, and refinement it is expected that an Ad Hoc dotNeighborhood Trust will endorse and present the Proclamation to our elected representatives for their thoughts, consideration, and assistance with developing the dotNeighborhoods.

Learn more about this initiative from the dotNeighborhoods wiki pages. (Commons image courtesy of sporkwrapper.)

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

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