Hi. I sent this note to the ALAC list last month, but I gather that there are new members in Cairo who might not have seen it, so you might want to pass this along. Thanks. FYI, the PAB and the rest of .mobi do all of their work in English. R's, John ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Subject: [At-Large] dot-mobi policy advisory board positions The .MOBI domain has a policy advisory board which includes a seat selected each year by the ALAC, and it's time to make this year's selection. I've held that seat for the two years that it has existed, and would like another year. The PAB meets monthly by phone and once a year in person. Its task is to provide policy advice for the management of the .MOBI domain. As you may know, .MOBI is intended for users of mobile devices, and the idea is that content in the .MOBI domain works on your mobile. So far that's been mostly a technical goal, since the state of the mobile web is sort of like the PC web ten years ago, with slow connections, small screens, and browsers with varying and sometimes incompatible features and capabilities. (There is a guy at .MOBI whose full time job is to maintain an encyclopedia of devices and browsers.) This year in the PAB we've addressed a variety of issues that affect users. The biggest problem is that in .MOBI there are a lot of domains owned by domain speculators who care little for the interests of users. In many cases they just leave their domains parked, which isn't great, but at least follows the rules, but sometimes they just point the domain at random parking sites that don't work on mobiles at all, due to large images, frames, etc. The domain has a compliance process so they know which sites don't work, and I've been helping them develop a combination of carrots and sticks to get the sites to do something reasonable on mobile phones. Farther out I'm trying to figure out ways to encourage domains to build useful content rather than link farms, with weather.mobi being a good example of a site that could have been a link farm but instead has useful weather forecasts. Even farther out than that, it seems pretty likely that mobile devices will catch up to PCs in capability, so any site that works on a PC will work on a mobile. At that point the other characteristics of mobiles become more important, that people tend to keep them with them much more than they keep their PCs with them, and that they physically move around so you can do stuff like have a site that uses geolocation to recommend restaurants near where you are right now. It'll still be important for .MOBI content to be good for mobile users, although the issues will be quite different. I've enjoyed doing this with .MOBI, think I've been doing a pretty good job, and would like to keep at it for at least another year. The .MOBI management has sent the ALAC explaining they'd like to hear back fairly soon. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.