Fast Facts
Location: Portland, Oregon
How long have you been in the domain industry? Since 2005
Favourite extension: .wiki
Domain name you wished you owned: icann.wiki
Now reading: domainnamewire and circleid
Best city for conferences: Dublin
Your mentor: Ray King
Q&A
Describe your company and how long you have been there?
Jackie has been with ICANNWiki since February 2015, and Dustin joined us in July 2015.
NamesCon is all about business networking. Can you tell us a story about the success of a meeting at NamesCon?
This will be ICANNWiki’s second time at NamesCon, but Dustin and Jackie’s first. We’re excited to connect with this vibrant community, learn from them and introduce them to our project.
Can you tell us about how your service or product helps deliver value to your customers?
ICANNWiki is a nonprofit resource that is essential to the ICANN and domain name communities. We provide the facts about any given TLD, registry/registrar and the people that make those things work and flourish. We also provide up-to-date information on policy decisions made by ICANN. Our mission is to provide free and accessible information to our communities, facilitating the discussion on internet governance, while spreading awareness about the new gTLDs.
What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?
We’re excited about the new level of inclusivity that the new TLDs will bring to the domain space. In particular, GeoTLDs, Community TLDs and IDNs provide an opportunity for communities and regions to identify with their domains. Providing domains in different scripts will be a critical part of bridging the digital divide, especially once Universal Acceptance becomes widespread.
What kinds of changes do you foresee within the industry in the next year? 5 years?
Certain TLDs will succeed because they’re universally meaningful, providing users with a niche space in an otherwise overwhelming atmosphere. Other TLDs may struggle to create lasting value to users because of how generic or gimmicky they may be. A solid period of renewals for the first batch of new TLDs will probably give us the best lay of the land.
What are you most looking forward to at the upcoming NamesCon?
We spend most of our time involved with the ICANN community, so we are looking forward to increasing awareness surrounding ICANNWiki and our mission in a new community.
How would you describe what you do in a single sentence to a stranger?
We manage the encyclopedia of the Internet.
If you had fifteen extra minutes each day, what would you do with them?
Keep up with all the various ICANN constituencies, absorb their conclusions and add all that to the wiki!
Name 3 things you can’t travel without.
Laptops, fluffy travel neck pillows and ICANNWiki swag.
What is ICANNWiki most excited about within the year ahead?
We’ve partnered with a few organizations to translate key articles into Spanish and Chinese. We hope to transition these articles into a standalone wikis so that native speakers and readers can read about ICANN, Internet governances and new TLDs in their own language!
