Campaign for the .nyc TLD
COMMUNITY
Campaign for the .nyc TLD
Phone number:
718 639 4222
Project description:
As the Internet becomes central to civic, commercial, community, and cultural life, those with the best tools and understanding of its capabilities will prosper. Using research, education, training, and outreach, Connecting.nyc Inc.'s mission is to prepare the city for our networked future. To do so, we will use the .nyc TLD (like .com or .org but just for New York City) to plan, to organize, and to empower New York City's residents, institutions, and businesses to better connect with one another and the world.
The latest project we've sponsored is entitled Issue-Communities for which we've applied for a Knight Foundation grant. We have until November 30th to submit our Round Two proposal. Suggestions are welcomed.
Contact name:
Thomas Lowenhaupt
Email:
Comments
We submitted our proposal to the New Challenge grant yesterday. In substance it's much like the original, but some clarity and detail have been added, along with the answers to several additional questions. Where there were originally 2,100 submissions, the weaning process has 234 applications remaining. We've been advised that if our project is looked upon favorably, we'll be asked to submit a budget. A final decision is not expected until next summer.
For those who've not seen the site's review process, it's worth a look. Those who register on the News Challenge site are allowed to rate and comment on the proposals. I'm uncertain of the role these ratings play. But if you like ours, please enter a star rating. But be warned, it's an unforgiving system. Run your cursor over the stars and click when you're sure of your decision. There no second chance to correct. If you're determined to test the truth of that statement, do it with a 5 star test.
The Knight Foundation chose not to make the round 2 applications accessible to the public. We're sorry to hear that as we were hoping for some critiques of our Issue-Communities proposal. But our proposal is available on our wiki at http://www.openplans.org/projects/campaign-for.nyc/issue-communities. It's not the final version as we did much fine tuning on the application submission form, only discovering too late that it was not be made public. (I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups. I will always do bakups. I will always do backups. I will always do backups.)
In 2008 1,200 applications were submitted to the Knight Foundation for their News Challenge grants and we were one of 50 that advanced to the final round. Knight selected 7 applications, most regrettably not ours.
This year we submitted a similar application and are delighted to announce that we have been selected to enter round two. In round 2 we provided answers to several additional questions. Our answers can be found at http://bit.ly/Issue-Communities-At-Knight.
There were two new questions in this year's second round:
Q 1 - Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?
Answer 1 - We will experiment with various business models, beginning with the one outlined in the below "self-sustainable" question.
Q 2 - If it is to be self-sustainable, what is the plan for making that happen?
Answer 2 - We will be providing a set of planning and organizing tools to the creators of Issue-Communities. We will experiment with issuing these tools only to Issue-Community participants who agree that, for a limited period, a designated publisher will have exclusive rights to report on Community developments. The designated publisher would pay a fee to Connecting.nyc Inc. for these rights. The efficacy of placing different types of ads on Issue-Community pages will be explored. The use of the designated publisher, and/or an ad service, as ad agent will be evaluated.
Go to the Knight site and enter your thoughts. There's comment space, the capability to link our proposal to related News Challenge applications, and you can give our proposal a rating - we suggest 5 stars (more if you can hack it).
Best,
Tom Lowenhaupt
P.S. We'll be posting an update on a related project, our dotNeighborhoods initiative - http://bit.ly/dotNeighborhoods - in the coming days.