Australian Community Initiative Reaches 100 Domain Registrations

Posted on November 25th, 2008 by admin in Domain News | No Comments »

Talgarno, Victoria is the 100th community in Australia to apply for its own website under the world first Community Geographic Domain Name Initiative thanks to the auCD.

auCD – Australian Community Domains – is a non profit venture established by auDA (.au Domain Administration Ltd) to facilitate the development of Community Geographic Domain Names (CGDNs) and allow communities who want to register their geographic domain name for a community website portal for the purpose of preserving Australian geographic names for use by the relevant local community (a very smart move by auDA I reckon).

As part of this initiative in 2004 auDA decided to create a new second level domain in .au for each state and territory (wa.au, vic.au, nt.au, etc). Names that can be registered in these 8 new second levels are limited to address localities in the relevant state/territory (subiaco.wa.au, carlton.vic.au, alicesprings.nt.au, etc).

Australia is the first country in the world to implement the Community Geographic Domain Name initiative by providing all localities around Australia with their own website address.

Leonie Dunbar, General Manager of .au Community Domains (auCD) comments in a the auCD 100th domain press release:

“The 100th application is an important milestone for communities Australia wide, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. An additional 300 communities have registered their interest in applying for a community website and we are currently averaging an application everyday”.

To apply for your community’s home on the net, go to: http://www.aucd.org.au/howtoapply/

You can find a list of current community websites here.

It will be interesting to see whether other ccTlds take a similar approach to allow communities to have their own portals – a brilliant idea in my opinion.