Public naming: demo site and APIs

[John Tigue]

3 point summary

1. Moving forward, SEANetMap's demo site will be: http://seattlegig.net

2. Moving forward, broadbandtogether.com will no longer be the demo site

3. SEANetMap's APIs will go by a public-friendly name, say, Broadband Status APIs

Naming deadline

Saturday is the National Day of Civic Hacking:

http://hackforchange.org/

The SEANetMap project will be at Seattle's hackathon on Saturday with its own table. This represents the first time the public will become aware of the project. This is our last chance to set the path for naming.

I came up with the name "SEANetMap" on the spot at the 2015-04-19 meeting when we had to name the repo something. It is a name only a developer could love. After living with the name for over two months, it has never caught on with me, let alone anyone else. That name cannot be easily changed at this time. Too many links already point to the GitHub repository:

https://github.com/codeforseattle/seanetmap

The other name associated with the project is that of the demo deploy:

http://broadbandtogether.com/

So, left as things are I would expect the public to start using the name "Broadband Together" which is a cute enough play on words if you break things down syllabically. But, still, it is not a great name.

DNS

I have just purchased two domain names:

seattlegig.com

seattlegig.net

By Saturday:

1. Those DNS records will be propagated globally

2. On HTTP, seattlegig.com will redirect to seattlegig.net

3. On HTTP, broadbandtogether.com will redirect to seattlegig.net

4. The code will be publicly experienceable at seattlegig.net

5. (The GitHub repo, codeforseattle/seanetmap, will remain as it is.)

Broadband Status APIs

Another naming deadline upon us is the name for SEANetMap's APIs. SEANetMap is the name of the code. The name of the APIs should not be "the SEANetMap APIs" because "SEANetMap" is not self-descriptive and will hamper conceptual diffusion with the public. "The Broadband Status APIs" is much more descriptive and is the best name we have come up with ahead of Saturday. So, for Saturday the name we are going with is the Broadband Status APIs. If something better comes along later, fine, we can change to that; the more important issue is that the public knows what URL to use when discussing this project moving forward: seattlegig.

In summary, these new names could be using in a sentence such as:

"The Broadband Status APIs provide broadband network situational awareness information to web applications, and are a part of the technical foundation upon with net neutrality can be monitored. The APIs were first deployed at seattlegig.net."

-John