Move ownership of diasporaproject.org/diasporafoundation.org into the community

I think I saw some discussion around it already but couldn't find it anymore, hence the new topic.

Sean, first of all thanks for securing diaspora-project.org.

Media is slowly adopting diasporaproject.org as the projects site over joindiaspora.com, switching the domain name again and that to such a subtle different one would be PR disaster in my view.

We should try to move the ownership of such essential domains into the community so that we have a greater control over them and can quickly move them into a foundation or whatever legal organization we replace Diaspora Inc with (OT). I'm willing to contact the owner of diasporaproject.org about this, but since diasporafoundation.org is already pointing to diasporaproject.org and diasporafoundation.org's whois only shows the Dreamhost proxy I wonder if Diaspora Inc already has contacts, Sean?

I'm also willing to pay for the domains until we have a community driven legal structure.

+1 for what Jonne said

I agree - I said the same the other day. Sean says he's contacting the owner of diasporaproject.org - hopefully we'll have some news soon.

I think the ownership/control of those domains and the sites hosted on them ought to rest with people at the heart of the project, not people in the wider community (such as myself, for instance). I, as a community member, could get bored with the project or turn actively against it, and if the domain is being publicised as a portal into Diaspora, we don't want to run the risk that the community member who controls it will put up bad stuff on it in the future. If you see what I mean. Eg, the person who bought diasporaproject.org was, I assume, an active part of the community when it was set up, but now seems to be inactive and hard to get hold of. It would be good to find a way to ensure that this doesn't happen in the future, because we need those sites to be available for update at any time.

So while it's generous of you to offer to pay for the domains, Jonne, I think the ultimate ownership/control over them ought to remain with people at the core of the project, be it Dan, Maxwell or whoever (not sure on the current structure of the core team).

That's why I want to hand them over to a foundation ASAP. But Max and Dan apparently aren't willing to participate here nor at Github and continue the behind the scenes email communication that made Diasporas development so in-transparent and unfocused, that scared away a lot of potential contributors. And you really think those people would allow a more flexible handling of the domains when subdomains are needed etc?

Oh btw. if I turn away from the project without handing over anything you're doomed anyway as no one else has the API key to pull the translations currently :P