Confused with GOSH email adresses

Community Governance Council Discuss
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I am a bit confused with official email addresses of GOSH.
It seems that NPO and council emails are all ending in openhardware.science - and ideas of how to be more clear on what are admin and board of community and of NGO somehow?

  • NPO Board: board with ending openhardware.science
  • NPO / PublicLab admin (Jess ?): admin with the ending openhardware.science
  • GOSH council: goshcouncil with the ending openhardware.science
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Hello @gaudi, thanks for reaching out on the forum, please allow me - as a member of the GOSH Community Council - to clarify the situation and where we are going.

The openhardware.science domain was registered and began use several years ago for emails related to the wider GOSH community.

When the GOSH non-profit organisation was formed (which I think is what you are referring to with “NPO”), its email addresses also used the same domain out of logistical convenience.

This led to the current confusion/conflation where both GOSH community emails and GOSH non-profit organsation emails share the same domain.

As you know, the GOSH Community Council is working with the GOSH non-profit to better clarify and delineate their relationship, and the point you raised about email domain is an important part of that.

I can report that progress has been made towards this goal:

  1. The process for coming up with a constitution for the GOSH community (as originally posted here) is continuing through the newly elected 2022-2023 Community Council. And as described in this thread, @lizbarry has generously agreed to stay on to help this constitutional process. This constitution will codify principles for the relationship between the GOSH community and other organisations, including the GOSH non-profit, and we are working hard to include the whole community in this process.

  2. There will be an announcement soon from the GOSH non-profit organisation on its plans, which I think will address the confusion raised in this thread. Please look for it on this forum soon!

Thank you for asking this question!!

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Thanks for the detailed response, @hpy that sounds awesome.

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Hi @gaudi and everyone: I’m linking to the announcement here posted by @jcm80 for more information related to this thread. Check it out and comment/ask questions!

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Part of the problem was the non-profit was also called GOSH which meant it was hard to have its own email domain without it appearing to be a community email domain anyway.

This week the board voted to change the name to the Open Science Hardware Foundation. Under this name it will be able to get its own domain, own website, own logo etc. This will allow the foundation to establish its own identity. It will still support GOSH in the exact same manner, but will avoid confusion that it is GOSH.

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Thanks, @julianstirling, I should’ve been more clear in my previous post. :slight_smile: