- Joined
- Sep 25, 2006
- Posts
- 61
- Reaction score
- 14
Nominet supplied me with a list of its members as part of my Board election bid and I sent a mailing to every active member in the UK asking for their support.
I was expected a few returns but many more than I expected came back, every one due to some kind of issue with delivery: the most common being a Royal Mail sticker with the box "addressee gone away" ticked. My local postie tells me that is when a business has moved.
So I started digging into some of these returns, and I've been amazed to find that some addresses - which are still in Nominet most current member data - are a decade out of date. One even had "Demolished" written on it - I checked it out, and the trading estate it was addressed to had been raised at least five years earlier and a new housing estate built on top.
Not only that but two Nominet members have been in touch with me to say that they haven't received the voting email from Nominet - presumably because Nominet also has the wrong email address for them..
Why is this important and why am I bugging you about it?
Because Nominet is a member organisation and so much of what Nominet decides and how the organisation approaches the .uk space is built on that membership. It informs what Nominet does, and how it does it and it also impacts members' voting rights.
It's very possible - even likely - that many of those assumptions are simply wrong because the org is working from decade-old data. Imagine if you were working from .uk domain data from 2010.
So my question to you all - I assume the majority of you are Nominet members - is: has Nominet ever contacted you to verify your contact information?
If you move address, or change email, is it on you to inform Nominet - and, crucially, have you remembered to do so?
I recall Andrew Bennett has not once but twice identified voting miscalculations by Nominet - each time in the largest registrars' favour. It's possible that the whole system is skewed because a lot of members are effectively unreachable.
I was expected a few returns but many more than I expected came back, every one due to some kind of issue with delivery: the most common being a Royal Mail sticker with the box "addressee gone away" ticked. My local postie tells me that is when a business has moved.
So I started digging into some of these returns, and I've been amazed to find that some addresses - which are still in Nominet most current member data - are a decade out of date. One even had "Demolished" written on it - I checked it out, and the trading estate it was addressed to had been raised at least five years earlier and a new housing estate built on top.
Not only that but two Nominet members have been in touch with me to say that they haven't received the voting email from Nominet - presumably because Nominet also has the wrong email address for them..
Why is this important and why am I bugging you about it?
Because Nominet is a member organisation and so much of what Nominet decides and how the organisation approaches the .uk space is built on that membership. It informs what Nominet does, and how it does it and it also impacts members' voting rights.
It's very possible - even likely - that many of those assumptions are simply wrong because the org is working from decade-old data. Imagine if you were working from .uk domain data from 2010.
So my question to you all - I assume the majority of you are Nominet members - is: has Nominet ever contacted you to verify your contact information?
If you move address, or change email, is it on you to inform Nominet - and, crucially, have you remembered to do so?
I recall Andrew Bennett has not once but twice identified voting miscalculations by Nominet - each time in the largest registrars' favour. It's possible that the whole system is skewed because a lot of members are effectively unreachable.