Monthly Archives: June 2009

.eco would be a good domain to have.

A year and a half ago or so, I was introduced to two guys in Vancouver who were trying to start a new top-level domain for companies and organizations doing good environmental work – .eco. Their resumes and backgrounds were impressive, and they seemed to really know what they were doing, but still, I thought, what are the chances that these two guys could actually create a new top-level domain?

Cut to last week, and I run into Trevor Bowden, one of .eco founders, and they have made truly remarkable progress.

What? from dot eco on Vimeo.

They just launched their website, doteco.info, which is great blend of useful information and videos about what they are trying to accomplish, ways to participate and help spread the message, and information about their current supporters (some of whom are truly impressive). All in a very nice looking website. Pulling off an informative and good-looking website about a new concept is very difficult.

They are gearing up for a presentation in 2010 to ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers . This is the organization responsible for the Internet’s naming system.

So what is .eco?

The .eco system will display current, detailed eco-information to anyone with a browser, anytime they need it, anywhere on the planet. It will do this by collecting information from people when they register .eco domain names for their companies, organisations, products, or even themselves and then displaying that information on a standardised, open platform.

What they want to do with .eco is very impressive. They would link it to verifiable environmental action, so those using the .eco domain would be showing off a badge that they had made progress on reducing their environmental impact.

Treehugger has a great article about what they are doing.

They have one major competitor, namely Al Gore and a group who are also trying to start a .eco top-level domain. I’m a big fan of Al Gore, but it’s kind of fun to watch some guys from Vancouver put together a very different and very compelling alternative to a .eco domain and see if they can give the bigwigs a run for their money.

I think the .eco domain is useful. A company like Toyota could assume that people going to toyota.eco would be at their site for specific reasons, and they could highlight their environmental products and policies and corporate initiatives front and centre. It could be a form of built-in audience segmentation (those who choose to visit a .eco version of the site instead of a .com), and not just a redirect to a main corporate site.

So check out doteco.info and see what it’s all about. It may be coming to an Internet near you…

Preparing for Bologna.

Bologna

Things have been coming together nicely for my upcoming trip to Bologna. Just to recap, Vancity sends a small delegate to Bologna, and this year I have the great good fortune to be one of them.

We go to Bologna to learn from Stefano Zamagni, Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna, and visit several co-operatives in this area. The area around Bologna, Emilia Romagna, has 35% of the economy driven directly from co-operatives (it is estimated that they indirectly account for more than 50% of the local economic development).

I got my passport in the mail today, I have my plane tickets and hotel booked. Tomorrow I meet with a bunch of the other attendees to start prepping. I have read some of my pre-reading, including a paper we wrote for the BC Business Council about co-operatives and the part they could play in driving critical growth for our province.

In my last post, I wrote a little bit about Vancity’s new vision of Redefining Wealth. I am heartened by the response I got from that. My friend Jeremy Osborn, a local social entrepreneur focused on climate change said: “What a great, broad way to think about sustainability.” Not everyone gets this directly. I mean why is a credit union taking on something like redefining wealth?

We are a credit union focused on our triple bottom line objectives: economic, social and environmental. We measure our success based on a blended value in these areas. But we are a financial institution, and as such our objectives have to be grounded in the tools of our trade. Redefining Wealth, in my opinion, is an inclusive, holistic view of sustainability rooted in finances. It isn’t anything amazingly new for Vancity, but clarifies our role as a financial institution dedicated to social change.

This vision will drive our objectives over the next ten years, and I’m excited to be at the ground floor in defining what it means for our members, our staff and the communities where we live and work. It also has implications on our products and services, our service delivery experience, our technology choices, our suppliers and vendors… The list goes on.

In my view it takes a triple bottom line approach and blends it into a married value. In other words, a triple bottom line approach can be one where we maximize profits in order to do good work in the environmental and social pillars with our profits. We have always done this in the form of granting. But Redefining Wealth causes us to work even harder to ensure that all the ways we do business have a positive impact on our financial bottom line, as well as enhancing our members’ and employees’ communities. What if our basic service offering, our sponsorships, our deals made the environment better, our communities stronger and made us money. It’s complicated, but it’s something to aspire to.

Photo credit – torsonor