Dear Digital District Community –
A number of you have reached out to us regarding some confusion between our name and an initiative in the works by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) in DC. We appreciate your questions and would like to share with you an explanation of recent events.
On January 7, one of our partners informed us that someone in the DMPED office wanted to talk to us regarding our nonprofit’s name, Digital District. When we made contact with the point person in the DMPED office later that day, she informed us that the DC government were also planning to use the name Digital District for a new initiative they plan to launch at SXSW.
While she did not provide many details about their project, it was clear that it shared some similarities with our mission: to improve digital literacy and to encourage the DC community to innovate, educate, and participate in the digital space.
During our initial contact with the DMPED office, the point person stated that they wanted us to change our name, they would possibly compensate us for it and help us file papers to change it, and implied they would also like us to transfer all of our social accounts, and associated followers that we have built over the past 5 years to them with the transferal of the name.
While we cannot speak to the authority level of the person with whom we spoke or to what extent other members of the DMPED’s office were aware of the situation, it was clear to us that our contact was very much trying to bully us to change our name.
At the time of these conversations, our team had already established the Digital District name, legally and socially, formally launched our organization and started accepting paid memberships.
In an effort to resolve the issue, we set a meeting with the DMPED contact and her team for January 8, but, after numerous attempts to reach them to confirm the meeting, we received the following response after COB on January 8:
My apologies for the delay in response.
We are still in conversations internally about next steps and would like to postpone a meeting until we can make some recommendations about next steps.
I will touch base again until later today. We appreciate your patience and your willingness to continue the dialogue.
We continued to attempt to speak with them, but did not receive any further response. We believed (perhaps hoped is the better word) at that point that the DMPED office decided to change their name and the issue was resolved.
However, while in NYC attending social media week, we held a meeting with a potential partner who inquired about the name confusion and confirmed that the DMPED’s initiative was indeed moving forward and had scheduled a launch for March 5.
And then yesterday we spotted a post in the DC Tech group on Facebook, which had an event flyer sporting the Digital District name. People began asking our team and posting comments asking who they were, if they were affiliated with us, and what the event was about.
Naturally, this concerned us. Our members and supporters were clearly confused by their use of the Digital District name.
On February 25, we issued a cease and desist letter to our contact at DMPED. We followed up again with additional contacts on February 26, and finally received a response directly from Deputy Mayor Victor Hoskins indicating that they would stop using the Digital District name and apologizing that this had not been handled sooner. At this time, we also heard, through a member of the press, that DMPED’s office had retracted the use of the Digital District name.
We appreciate Deputy Mayor Hoskins’s prompt response, and believe that their new initiative, under a new name, could be a great opportunity for DC.
We would like to thank you, as well, for bringing this to our attention and for so vocally supporting us on social media these last few days. We, as an organization, believe strongly in the benefits of collaboration among our community in DC and recent events have shown us just how strong we are when working together.
We cannot thank you enough for your continued support and look forward to seeing you all at a Digital District event very soon.
Respectfully yours,
The Digital District Board
Digital District Background
Each month Digital District hosts a panel of experts that share their experiences and background on subjects that matter to DC’s digital community. In addition to our panels, we host networking happy hours where we help connect job seekers and freelancers to new opportunities, and have recently launched Web events so that other cities can benefit from these educational series. In addition to our regular programming, we have a partnership with George Washington University to provide a lecture series to help graduating students prepare their social presence for the working world, and hold an annual career success fair filled with experts to help clean up their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and interview skills.
Our team is fully comprised of volunteers who share the same vision and mission. We run on passion, and a lot of coffee. All funds go directly to support our members and the events we put on for them.
You can find us at on Twitter, thedigitaldistrict.org, and on Facebook /thedigitaldistrict
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