City.vi is a concept that has been introduced by City Media Foundation, a foundation based in Lausanne, Switzerland. The network is made up of 68000 sites of cities all across the world, the largest network of such sites. Each site is a information portal for the local information about the city. The local information of each city can be accessed by the simple URL like "cityname.vi".

E.g. paris.vi, boston.vi, lima.vi, Mumbai.vi, Tokyo.vi etc.

The site network has been launched on 10.10.2010.

The concept behind the idea is changing nature of information gathering on the internet. Last decade of internet was about searching for the information. Now its about applications that get information. So all the information, especially geographically specific information, are lost in the avalanche of general information available online.

To get any local information, normally one would go to the search engine like Google and type in the keywords, scan through the results, and look for results at the wrong places first by hit-and-trial. It is a time consuming process and can be cut short if the information is sorted geographically, in this case, sort by city name. The URL is intuitive and goes by the name of the city followed by the TDL ".vi". So it’s not time consuming and very accessible.

Like all the tools offered by the CITY MEDIA foundation, the City.vi network sites can be administered by the local authorities, particularly the mayors, representatives and various officials of these cities and regions. If not, the sites will be managed by relevant local bloggers. The City.vi network sites complement the cities’ official sites perfectly, providing a complete video forum. Moreover, the sites are open on all web's content by allowing video embedding.

The site will be operated by one administrator for every city.

1. Citizens put forward videos to do with the town, city or region covered by the site.

2. The site administrators responsible for that video category (culture, news, events) are informed by email when new videos are put forward.

3. They decide if the videos can appear on the site.

CITY MEDIA FOUNDATION will be approaching around 1 million bloggers and video enthusiast who could be interested in becoming the administrator of the site in about a week. There will be a bloggers conference on its Facebook and Twitter channel of City.vi.

The actions facilitated by a City.vi site include:

1. Promoting the cultural and tourism heritage, encouraging its development and conservation.

2. Presenting useful information to visitors and advising them about the most significant sites of interest.

3. Presenting cultural activities and their schedules, e.g. theatrical and musical productions and so on.

4. Raising local citizen awareness about particular causes or projects and garnering support.

5. Facilitating dissemination of important information due to its ease of access.

etc.

Another important feature for people using the City.vi network sites is the facility for businesses that are based in each town, city to register on these sites. Businesses can be found by the services they offer and they can also give people much better information on all their activities with videos.