Domain expired Social Coop down

So after some frantic investigations it turns out the domain is still being managed by Enric Duran who I am led to believe facilitated its purchase and stewardship as part of one of the Fair Coop group of co-ops (have to be a registered co-op to buy a .coop domain).

Given that Principle Six is now our fiscal sponsor it feels more appropriate that they also hold the domain.

Wondering how/if this could happen @Graham or anyone else?

Guess ideally it could be set up in a way where Social Coop had access to admin / renew the domain so we don't have to pester Principle Six to do that stuff for us.

The domain is currently registered with Gandi. Based on my experiences elsewhere I think its somewhat likely to be easier to transfer it to another Gandi account, which could grease the wheels for a smooth domain transfer.

Thanks to all for rapid sleuthing and response! Definitely need to avoid this type of scenario in the future.

Hi. Thanks for tagging me here. Platform 6 Development Cooperative would be happy to look after this domain registration on behalf of social.coop. I run a reseller account with Gandi where the domain can be moved to.

My suggestion, in order to minimise the amount of work that Enric needs to do on this, is that he changes the admin contact for the domain to me, details below. As I understand it, as the admin contact I should then be able to initiate the change of ownership (the owner/registrant contact for the domain), which is a little more involved.

Details:

The tech cooperative that I work for should be the admin contact for the domain:

Name: Mitchell Coxan Creative Communications LLP

Type: Company

Email: [email protected]

Address:

Street address: 58 Varley Road

Postal code: HD7 5HL

City: Huddersfield

Country: United Kingdom

Phone: +44.1484846231

I should also say that Enric and I have met - online at least - in relation to Faircoop (I run one of the cooperatively validated nodes on the Faircoin blockchain), so happy for him to contact me directly with any questions.

Thanks @Darren @Graham for your response and willingness to help with this.

I am a member of the community working group ops team, but we wanted to facilitate the next steps too with the tech group and @Noah. I think we are ok with Graham and with P6 to manage the domain registration. Thanks @Graham . What do we need to do next? Can someone connect with Enric and see how we can get those admin contact settings changed as Graham explains?

Just chiming in here that I see no problem with this, provided that Graham doesn't mind if a couple of us have calendar reminders set for roughly 11 months to ping him about renewal :D

Let me know if I can support. Let's definitely make sure to get this settled this time.

Appears that everyone whos expressed an opinion has agreed that the domain should be transferred to Platform 6 / Graham.

Theres been some discussions in both the general and tech group matrix rooms about control, security and chain of custody transparency of the domain name management.

I was already thinking it would be nice to get some clarification on the relationship between Platform 6 and Mitchell Coxan Creative Communications LLP (MC3), did a but of digging myself and found that MC3 is one of the two founding members (both co-ops) of Platform 6.

It appears that whats being proposed is MC3 will be holding the domain on the behalf of Platform 6, on behalf of Social Coop.

Personally I'm OK with this, and don't want to labour the process, but feel, for the sake of due diligence, would be good to get confirmation of the situation from @Graham and then, following our bylaws we'd maybe need a proposal/vote here? Although also I guess a clear decision from the tech working group may be sufficient.

I think it would be good to have that clear decision for action in place that we could point Enric towards

Happy to clarify/confirm: My understanding is that Platform 6 Development Cooperative would be the registrant/owner of the domain, on behalf of social.coop, because Platform 6 is a suitable legal entity that would be recognised by the registry as a legitimate registrant of a .coop domain name. MC3 is a founder member of Platform 6, and also operates a Gandi reseller account (MC3 is a tech co-op and as such manage domains on behalf of a number of clients). I'm a founder partner at MC3 (which is structured as a limited liability partnership or LLP), and I'm a director of Platform 6 (which is a LLC).

To facilitate the proposed change of registrant/owner of the domain from Enric's co-op to Platform 6, and to remove the burden of handling this from Enric, I've proposed that Enric changes the admin contact for the domain, as I understand that this would then make the domain accessible to me in my Gandi account, enabling me to manage the change of registrant and any liaison with the registry.

Once the registrant record has been successfully changed I believe that it would also be feasible and perhaps helpful to modify the other contact records for the domain (each domain has four contacts - registrant, admin, tech, and billing). With Platform 6 as the registrant it might then make sense for social.coop to be the tech contact, MC3 to continue as the admin contact, with Platform 6 as the billing contact. I'd need to look into the details of how Gandi works with contacts, but this type of approach may enable social.coop to access and as needed amend DNS records.

If any further info is needed, just let me know.

Thanks @Darren, I think some kind of quick input from community members would be a ideal because we want to be participatory and make it easy to express our thoughts on this. Members are always free to express their thoughts at any time and in this thread and maybe a poll would be a good quick way to engage members in this if they want too.

Would you or the tech team be okay with starting a poll here summarizing what course of action the tech team endorses followed by a multiple choice poll in which members can add options and suggestions for other courses of action. For example, the poll could ask:

What do you think is the ideal way to handle our domain registration?

Options:

Let's do the domain registration and transfer process the tech team has suggested to do with Graham and with our financial/legal host which is platform 6 and MC3.

I am not sure, abstain.

Allow other options.

What does everyone think? Is a poll like this a good idea and is it good to send out to everyone? Any other suggestions? Is this asking too much input/participation from members? 47 people have seen this thread so far but only a few have interacted. Is a proposal/vote also needed?

If people think there are some options to choose between and want to put it to a poll, seems fine to me.

... only here, I don't see any other proposals. We didn't formally ask for proposals for action, but there has been a fair bit of discussion about it already and nothing else has emerged as far as I can see.

(Given I think the status quo is not really an option)

Maybe if you think a poll is a good idea still, perhaps make a call for more proposals so there would actually be something to choose between? If some emerge, then those could be put to a vote.

@Jonathan Bean @Darren I'm not sure I think it's necessary to get community approval for this, but if you want to go ahead and do it, that's fine. It's not really a policy decision, and it's a clear extension of our use of P6 as our fiscal sponsor.

@Nick Sellen @Nathan Schneider @Darren , Right, it is not really a policy decision and a full community vote would be unnecessary and there has been enough deliberation with the tech group. I think most people would just be confused about why haven't already done this anyway. Also it is not unreverseable so anyone who thinks it is a bad idea or has a better solution can propose it anytime.

https://social.coop/terms - Bylaws for reference

I guess now we have a decision and we need someone to connect @Graham to Enric or whoever is managing his account? Who knows how to reach Enric?

Yeah guess I was unnecessarily labouring the process 🤭. I'll send Enric a link here and hopefully he'll do the transfer.

@Graham we are still trying to organise the domain transfer with Enric. Are you on Telegram?

Looks like it’s that time of year again, I imagine Enric has yet to transfer the domain name to us.

We are discussing this in the Matrix rooms -- unfortunately the domain has indeed expired again as we failed to make progress on https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/operations/-/issues/11. We will track making sure this can't happen again using that ticket.

In the meantime, I am struggling to determine if Faircoop/Enric is still holding the domain or it made it to Platform 6 at some point in time. I will try to keep this thread posted with news, but unfortunately given the domain is owned in a EU timezone in either case it seems it'll be at least a few more hours until we can make progress on this.

As reported on https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/operations/-/issues/11:

We were able to pay for the domain renewal with a different Gandi account -- this is a Gandi feature that Mayel found.

Now, let's try to use this experience to get the domain transfer done, or at least privilege delegation within Gandi to accounts owned by the TWG.

MANY THANKS to everyone who resolved this so promptly! And yes, if there's anything that regular members can do to support this, just ask!

Thanks to those who solved this. I don't know why this has plagued us for so long. @Graham @Leo Sammallahti can you report on the situation from the P6 side?