I'm for individual ownership and management over organizational.
Organizations tend to not have written documentation, and to rely on
institutional memory.  I see two things going wrong:  Contact at OSU leaves
OSU and no one thinks to renew domain, or OSU doesn't have a dedicated
contact and at some point they don't renew because they don't see the value.

Also important:  OSU is on state funding cycles, so may have some rule
against renewing for more than a year at a time.  So, the deadline to renew
will come more frequently than it would with unrestricted funds and the
ability to renew for 5 or 10 years at a time.

When the domain expires, it will go into a redemption period of about a
month.  I remember what the whois record looks like for domains in the
redemption period, and whois does give the contact information.  Does the
URL stop working during this period?  If so, then that's great because if
there is a problem with a renewal then many people will notice the URL not
working, and be able to check the status of the domain and get on it.

-Wilhelmina Randtke


On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 2:32 PM, Ed Summers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> HI all,
>
> I've owned the code4lib.org since 2005 and have been thinking it might
> be wise for to transfer ownership of it to someone else. Sometimes I
> forget to pay bills, and miss emails, and it seems like the domain
> means something to a larger group of people.
>
> With Ryan Ordway's help Oregon State University indicated they would
> be willing to take over administration of the domain. They also have
> been responsible for running the Drupal instance at code4lib.org and
> the Mediawiki instance at wiki.code4lib.org -- so it seems like a
> logical move.
>
> But I thought I would bring it up here first in the interests of
> transparency, community building and whatnot, to see if there were any
> objections or ideas.
>
> //Ed
>