Ownership of voxpupuli.org

[daenney]

Hey @voxpupuli/project-maintainers, I currently still own all the Voxpupli related domains (.org, .com and .community). These three will expire on 18 December 2017. I'll renew .org but I'll let .community and .com expire since we've never really used these and as such I don't really feel like paying for them 😄.

That said, it's probably a good idea if I don't hold on to these domains personally (and maybe you want to keep .com or .community for some reason). I'm obviously not going to do anything malicious with it and I don't mind paying the few dollars the .org domain costs, but since I'm not that involved anymore it's probably better long term if I don't own these. Currently all the domains are setup to point to Cloudflare (which is how we achieve the GitHub Pages hosting with the .org domain, TLS and other fun) so I figured it might be nicer to transfer everything out of my control to the VP Cloudflare account and someone add a payment method there instead.

So, what do you think? What should we do?

[rnelson0]

@daenney I think there should be at least one more contact for anything technical (I haven't managed DNS in over a decade) but I'd be happy to cover the costs and be a contact, if that's possible. Email is this nick at gmail, to work out any specifics surrounding account setup.

[bbriggs]

Likewise, even though I'm stepping down in Oct, I'd be happy to contribute towards costs.

[juniorsysadmin]

Bump

[bastelfreak]

I am also happy to manage them, if another person is needed.

[daenney]

So this thing is hooked to my account. Managing that would mean getting access to my Namecheap account, which isn't going to happen. I'm not aware of any option to share custody of the domain with multiple people but if that is possible, do let me know. I'm happy to set up a shared account for it and transfer to that, but I won't add my billing information to something that's partially outside of my control. We need to find a solution for that. Even if we set up a shared account now, the problem still remains what happens when people leave the steering group but retain access to that account etc.

The issue here is not cost, I don't really care about that. The problem at hand is that I believe this domain should be owned by the community itself and as such have control over it, not by me. And I'm not aware of a registrar where people could easily be given the ability to manage the domain, and have that ability revoked, without needing to resolve to a shared account structure. Lastly, I don't think that anyone individually should be responsible for the billing piece.

Are we any closer to pulling us into SF Conserbancy or an organistaiton like that? They could easily hold these kinds of assets for us, making the situation a bit easier.

[bastelfreak]

I currently have a domain handle for voxpupu.li at ovh.de to manage the domain. It shouldn't be a problem to share those credentials via our plumbing repo, so that the whole PMC can access them (I need to verify the OVH details). We're closer to getting into the SF, but still not done.

[bbriggs]

Google Domains allows people to share administrative access to domains. That's definitely an idea.

[daenney]

That would work for me, I'm happy to transfer the domain to someone that wants to take this on and set up the initial account. I'll hand over the transfer auth code once that's set up.

[bbriggs]

I'll talk with @bastelfreak about it tomorrow and we'll work out where it should go. If it's just a matter of hanging onto the domain name and letting it auto-renew, I'd be happy to do that.

[alexjfisher]

https://www.gandi.net also allows you to delegate rights to multiple users. I've got all my domains with them and would recommend highly.

[daenney]

Cool, let me know once you have something set up that the community controls and I'll authorize the domains for transfer.

[alexjfisher]

There's a potential problem when it comes to who technically 'owns' the domains. I went through the gandi docs and whilst I could create a new voxpupuli 'organisation' I'm not sure we count as a 'legal entity'.

I think @nibalizer had some plans for VP to join the https://sfconservancy.org/ to avoid this sort of thing.

[bbriggs]

We are very, very close to being in. This has been the longest application process ever :/

[daenney]

That's good news though 😄.

[bastelfreak]

I just had a quick talk with @bbriggs. We would like to migrate the domain to google DNS/domain hosting. They allow an owner/person-that-pays account and delegated admin accounts that can modify DNS without seeing bank/credit card details. I would volunteer to take over the ownership. @bbriggs made some good experience with DNS/Domain at google.
@voxpupuli/collaborators any objections?

[raphink]

SGTM

[robinbowes]

How does this sit with what @daenney said earlier:

The issue here is not cost, I don't really care about that. The problem at hand is that I believe this domain should be owned by the community itself and as such have control over it, not by me. And I'm not aware of a registrar where people could easily be given the ability to manage the domain, and have that ability revoked, without needing to resolve to a shared account structure. Lastly, I don't think that anyone individually should be responsible for the billing piece.

[daenney]

/me performs necromancy

Heya! So I'm still the owner of the domain 😈 and I'm good with that for now.

So how's this been progressing, and the whole software conservancy thing? Though I said originally I don't think any single person should own the domain or be responsible for the billing, I think it would at least be helpful to have multiple people with administrative access, and then we sort out the billing/ownership problem after. Combining the two requirements seems to have hampered progress in this area, and that's not good.

[jhoblitt]

It sounds like forming a small "sysadmin team", that all have administrative access to domain registration, cloudflare, etc. is a good idea. Could @voxpupuli/project-maintainers serve that role?

[zachfi]

+1 for gandi.