Joly MacFie writes: Last October 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.”. At ICANN’s recent 37th meeting in Nairobi, consensus was reached on the “overarching” issue of intellectual property protection. This leaves only the issue of the final (4th) draft of the Applicants Guidebook, expected before the 38th meeting in Brussels in June 2010, before the much delayed new generic top level domain (gTLD) delegation process can finally grind into action. (One caveat—a policy forbidding cross-ownership of registries and registrars is still not totally set in stone.)

The Internet Society - New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) has for some years been following the .nyc and ICANN process on behalf of the NYC community and will, on May 8 2010, host a symposium “dot nyc - How are we doing?” at NYU. At 1pm NYC Council Member Gale Brewer will deliver keynote remarks, then Vendor Eric Brunner-Williams of CORE Internet Council of Registrars will reveal details of their proposal to the City, and Antony Van Couvering of Minds + Machines earlier comments to the City Council concerning their proposal will be shown in video. After a break there will be a discussion “What’s it for?” about possible applications - civic, community, commercial, and “outside the box” - for a local top level domain. Speakers include Tom Lowenhaupdt of Connecting .nyc and Richard Knipel of Wikimedia NYC.

What: ISOC-NY Event: dot nyc - How are we doing?
When: Saturday May 8 2010 : 1pm - 4:30pm EST (1700-2030 UTC)
Where: Warren Weaver Hall NYU Rm102, 250 Mercer St, NY 10012
Who: Public Welcome. Admission Free.
Webcast: http://livestream.com/isocny
Sponsors: ISOC-NY; GatewaytoGov.org (webcast)
Meetup: http://internetpro.meetup.com/51/calendar/13100813/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=108703639164601

* Remote participation will be through the livestream chatroom.

More info: http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1515