Proposal to offer *.social.coop as an unofficial TLD/domain name for social cooperatives
Mayel de Borniol
Public
Seen by 50
Problem: Registering a .coop domain name is quite expensive and also bureaucratically difficult, especially for newly formed co-ops and coop-style collectives. Also standard domains like .org are often not available.
Solution: Social.coop can become an unofficial registrar and offer *.social.coop domain names for organisations that meet certain criteria for entry (to be defined). These organisations/collectives would also become a member of social.coop, contributing on OpenCollective, with a Mastodon account, and one vote through a member representative.
Example: I'm a member/volunteer of Khora, a really awesome community centre for refugees in Athens, which is run as a non-hierarchical non-profit cooperative: http://www.khora-athens.org/ which you can read about on our wiki: http://wiki.khora.social.coop/Khora:About (notice how the wiki is using the khora.social.coop domain name as an example, which I will change in case this proposal doesn't pass).
What does everyone think? I'll create a poll to see if there's consensus on the general idea, but I think we'll need to work out the criteria and figure out how easy it will be to implement and manage technically before making a final decision.
Poll Created Wed 2 May 2018 1:07PM
Potentially offer *.social.coop as an unofficial TLD/domain name for social cooperatives Closed Fri 4 May 2018 10:36AM
Looks like there definitely isn't consensus to become what amounts to a sub-registrar for almost any co-op to run whatever webservices they want.
It may still be interesting to reopen the conversation at a later time, maybe for more conservative options such as to provide social cloud services only (as part of the SaaS discussion) on *.social.coop
See main thread for details
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Agree | 35.7% | 5 |
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| Abstain | 42.9% | 6 |
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| Disagree | 21.4% | 3 |
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| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 79 |
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14 of 93 people have participated (15%)
Michele Kipiel
Wed 2 May 2018 3:54PM
I don't have enough legal nor tech knowledge to express myself on this matter, despite liking the idea a lot.
Matt Noyes
Wed 2 May 2018 5:10PM
for reasons stated in stream, love the idea though
Jake Beamish
Wed 2 May 2018 5:40PM
I like the idea in principle and it seems like a good way of getting more people involved, but as far as I can see it's iffy with the .coop rules. I imagine it'd involve a fair bit of admin work too
Sam Toland
Wed 2 May 2018 6:59PM
I think this is something that should be explored. Provided the idea is well iterated, I suspect I would support the idea in principle.
David Mynors
Thu 3 May 2018 8:36AM
I can see the point of doing this, but I worry that it might go against some .coop policy. I also also empathise with the concern that *.social.coop should be saved for social.coop-related pages (like the wiki)
Nathan Schneider
Thu 3 May 2018 4:42PM
I'm not sure this is appropriate, because we mean "social" as in social media, as opposed to other forms. This could be confusing. But I would be happy to consider finding another way for us to support awesome co-ops like Khora.
Mayel de Borniol Wed 2 May 2018 1:23PM
As long as our own criteria are compatible with their "Statement of Co-operative Identity" clauses I assume we should be OK?
Graham · Wed 2 May 2018 1:21PM
I'm not clear whether this is compliant with the terms and conditions of the .coop registry.
http://www.coop/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/140103-registration_agreement.pdf