Cascadia.wiki is currently being reserved and could be made available at my
request despite being considered a "premium" name. The company I work for
hosts a wiki farm and also provides hosting services in addition to .wiki
domains. It has the capacity and infrastructure to provide quality,
reliable hosting.
I am trying hard here to not pitch my company, but merely to express that
this offer should be interpreted as an "in-kind gift" by a company who is
invested in a strong wiki community and wiki culture. The CEO (my boss) is
a long-time wiki enthusiast (some of you may know him?) who lives in
Portland and is excited about the Cascadia affiliate. He has offered to
take care of the domain registration, hosting and renewals. More or less,
whatever the affiliate wants, he'd like to find a way to help and to reduce
stress on CWUG.
I don't think tax-deductibility comes into play here, since CWUG is not
(yet at least) a registered non-profit. However, if we were, we would
budget for domain registration and hosting, and if that were provided to us
for free by a company, we would consider this an in-kind contribution. The
same concept applies here, except in this case the company is not expecting
a tax receipt. I would also argue that CWUG gets the added benefit of not
being burdened with registering a name, subscribing to a hosting service
and having to remember to renew either.
That being said, if the group is more comfortable with tasking someone to
accept transfer of the domain and maintain hosting/renewals under his/her
own name, we can help with those arrangements, too. I am not sure what
additional detail is needed, but if you have specific questions or
concerns, I'd be happy to respond.
I won't be offended if CWUG decides to go another route. As a group
supporter and prospective board member, my goal is simply to bring what I
can offer to the table so that it benefits the group. Yes, I have a COI,
but I am acting in good faith and so is the company I work for. IMO, we are
lucky to have the registry for .wiki in Cascadia and we have an
opportunity here to form a partnership with a "local" company interested in
supporting the wiki community.
Jason
On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Benj. Mako Hill <mako(a)atdot.cc> wrote:
<quote who="Jason Moore" date="Sun,
Dec 07, 2014 at 08:38:50AM -0800">
I don't know if it is required that we use a
.org site (like most
other Wikimedia affiliates), assuming we create an external site
specifically for use by the group, but if we were interested in
using something like cascadia.wiki we (group members) would not need
to worry about registration, hosting, renewals and other maintenance
requirements.
So, I love the idea of using cascadia.wiki for the group. At the very
least, we could temporarliy just redirect somewhere else. I just did a
search though and saw that it had already been registered. Was that
one of us?
Also, I don't understand how this gets off the hook for registration,
hosting, renewels, etc?
Later,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto