From: Mitra 
Sent: Sunday, 4 January 2004 12:01 PM
To: jo.lim@auda.org.au
Subject: Submission on registration of Community Geographic 2LDs


Submission on registration of  Community Geographic 2LDs

I administer the domain www.tyagarah.org  on behalf of the Tyagarah 
Progress Association and Hall Committee Inc. (also known as the 
Tyagarah Sustainable Community Alliance).

I am also the project manager of the Byron Community Knowledge 
Management Project www.byronkm.com a NSW Board of Vocational 
Education and Training funded project looking at bringing groups of 
people within a locality together online and offline.

I have been involved in giving advice to a number of community 
organisations locally on establishing a web presence.

As background, I have been involved with online community networking 
since 1985 (founded www.gn.apc.org), and was involved in the 
definition of several key internet standards, so I have seen this 
process both from the technical, and the community perspective.

I am reading this draft from the perspective of a SMALL geographical 
locality, Tyagarah as a community has a population of probably 500 
people (the exact number is uncertain because like many semi-rural 
localities its boundaries are somewhat fuzzy and merge with other 
rural localities).

In general I support what you are trying to achieve, and how you are 
going about it, however I believe you need to review the policy to 
make sure it more closely meets the needs of SMALL localities with 
limited resources.

Specifically.

2a)i) (Incorporated not-for-profit entity) is probably a reasonable 
requirement although for a small locality it will not be a peak body 
with representatives, but will - as in our case - be the ONLY 
incorporated non-profit body in the locality, one that handles the 
village hall, lobbying on development/environment issues, landcare 
and any other project that two or more of the local residents wish to 
undertake under an incorporated banner.

Note also that many small incorporated bodies are seriously 
considering dis-incorporating, because of the requirement for 
insurance. The cost of liability insurance is frequently more than 
50% of a small community organisation's budget.

2a)i) Funding: May need to be viewed in relation to the size of the 
organisation - for example for a web-site of our size its completely 
maintained by volunteers, and running on donated hosting (a 
negligible cost to any local company).

2b) seems to require a separate entity for managing the domain, 
although this is unclear. For a small group the cost of incorporation 
(especially insurance) is a not-insignificant amount, and in fact 
could be significantly more than the cost of creating and managing 
the website given that these costs are in cash, and the website can 
frequently be created entirely with volunteer labor and gifted 
hosting.

It has been my experience that while the controlled method of the .au 
domains certainly has advantages over the Open-slather  US domains 
(.com / .org / .net) there is a down-size. The administrative 
bureaucracy has a reputation of being complicated and time-consuming. 
I know many companies that have had difficulty registering their 
.com.au's (for example because their product name is different from 
the formal name of the company) or .org.au's (difficulty with getting 
all the correct paper work to convince the authority). As a result, 
all the domains that I currently manage are registered in the US as 
.com, .net, .biz or .org any of which can be registered in minutes 
rather than weeks.

Basically, unless AUDA can come up with a policy that is simple, 
cheap and quick for organisations representing small localities, I 
would suggest that our local organisation will be better off as 
tyagarah.org than tyagarah.nsw.au.

Thanks for considering this submission.

- Mitra Ardron