We started Big Room Inc. because we wanted to take a great idea and make it real. It’s easy to think of a word like ‘eco’ and imagine it as a .eco, with millions of .eco names around the world identifying something as eco-oriented.

But we knew achieving that wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked. When we began work on .eco the hardest part for us was figuring out what does .eco stand for?

We saw that a lot of people were asking what makes something eco-friendly, and no one had yet come up with a comprehensive answer. To us, this looked most like an information management problem. Lots of eco-information is being produced, but it is rarely collected and presented in a simple and connected way.

WHO'S DECIDING WHAT'S GREEN?

So, we founded Big Room in 2007 to come up with a way of easily collecting and sharing eco-information without replacing existing eco-standards. Instead, in the tradition of the Internet, we would create a platform that enables them.

In 2008, we began by creating Ecolabelling.org, a website that organises information on hundreds of ecolabels around the world. We reasoned that better information on ecolabels would make it easier for companies to use them to make purchasing decisions. This site, in addition to helping us understand how to approach .eco, has now become the world's largest ecolabel information hub.

BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM

We also worked hard to pull together leading technology partners to ensure .eco would be as technically robust as possible. Managing a piece of global Internet infrastructure requires proven technologies and experienced partners who know the domain name space well.

At the same time as we were developing an understanding of pre-existing work on standards and a solid team of technical partners, we knew we would need the financial and intellectual capital to launch a global process to solve some the hardest questions facing .eco.

Through conversations with potential investors, advisors and partners over the course of 2008, we assembled a team of experts to assist us in financing and designing a way to respond to these questions.

Perhaps most importantly, all of our investors, partners, and advisors share our vision for getting the best sustainability outcomes from .eco.

WHAT'S NEXT?

For us, sharing our .eco story with the world is the culmination of almost two years of difficult but necessary work laying solid foundations for a global process that will determine the best way to operate .eco. Now that we've been through the research and assembled a team, we're ready to embark on the process of putting the right policies and technologies on top of this solid foundation.

So that's our story.

We are Anastasia O'Rourke, Jacob Malthouse and Trevor Bowden. Our company, Big Room Inc., is a for-benefit company, meaning we have a combined financial, social and environmental mission.

We have been working on sustainability and technology issues for a long time, and have done so at the United Nations Environment Programme, INSEAD Business School, Yale University, The Institute for Sustainable Futures (Sydney), The EcoDesign Foundation, International Institute for Sustainable Development, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

We all hope you will be interested in working with us on .eco! Click here to learn more about why we need your help.