Difference between revisions of "Occupy"

Latest revision as of 20:35, 17 December 2011

Imagine our city without Zuccotti Park, or any public parks for that matter.

Imagine our city without any public spaces, public transportation, public education, law enforcement, sanitation; in other words a place that didn't serve the PUBLIC INTEREST. Absurd of course, it wouldn't be a city. Today we have a governance structure that hires 300,000 city workers to look after our needs: maintaining our streets and parks, educating our children, providing pure drinking water... And we have a robust civic life with block and civic associations, community boards, church, social, and ethnic groups, sports teams, and more, all providing networks that enable residents to connect with one another to create a livable city.

As things now stand, we'll have none of these resources or commons spaces on the .nyc TLD. While city government has expressed an interest in acquiring the .nyc TLD, it has not yet figured out how to engage the public in a meaningful way in defining and developing our digital future. On this wiki the Internet Society's New York Chapter presents a channel for gathering and communicating the Internet community's desires for New York's TLD.

Now's the time to get involved, to join our Internet community through the traditional bottom-up Internet governance process. Join us in planning a thoughtfully developed digital infrastructure for the coming era. Join us as we deliberate and inform New York City's government on how the city's Internet community sees our TLD serving the public interest.

Questions

Operating a TLD is a complex process. The below are a few of the questions that must be answered if we're to fruitfully integrate New York's TLD into our traditional networks. Provide your thoughts. Add new questions. (Don't be concerned about format, it takes a bit of learning. The wiki-mice will fix any format errors.)

• What TLD best serves the long term needs of New York: .nyc, .newyork, or .newyorkcity? See this page on Regionalization for what some see as a possible role for the city's TLD.
• What governance process would you like to see for our TLD? Should we use Internet's multi-stakeholder model, the not-for-profit used by cable TV, a commons trust, or should we be inventing something entirely new? A variety of options are present here.
• Who should be eligible to use a New York TLD? Anyone, like with the .com, .net, and other standard TLDs? Or those who are part of the New York community? See this page for background on what the lawyers call "the Nexus question."
• How can we assure that New York's TLD is a sustainable resource, that names are available for our children and theirs? See here for background.

Some Resources

• The NYCWiki for neighborhoods - A collaboration between the Internet Society-NY, Wikimedia's New York chapter (Wikimedia is the publisher of Wikipedia and other commons resources), and Connecting.nyc Inc. NYCWiki's goal is to do for city neighborhoods what Wikipedia does for general information.
• ICANN's New TLD Site - See the application process for acquiring a new Top Level Domain.
• Connecting.nyc Inc. - A NYS not-for-profit created to advocate for the development of New York's TLD as a public interest resource. The organization views a city-TLD as digital infrastructure that will be most effective if thoughtfully introduced.
• NYCShare.org - A site created by the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications for presenting and engaging the public in decision making processes. Little used, it's one of the channels we'll use to present your ideas to city government and the public.

References

• The Internet is a Semicommons - James Grimmelman, Fordham Law Review, May 2010 [1]