[Chapter-delegates] usage of internetsociety and/or isoc in Germany

[Hans Peter Dittler]

Hello all,

I was hesitating to jump into this discussion, but now I will do, even risking some more flaming.

I understand the main motivation for the move from www.ISOC.org to www.internetsociety.org.
I am not convinced that all of those arguments are true outside the English-Language area - but that needs more discussion and research.
The discussion about the main website and the naming of Internet Society should be continued (or started?) in a different thread.

Back to our situation in Germany:

We in Germany used ISOC.DE for more than 15 years now.
Our official name is " Internet Society, German Chapter (ISOC.DE) e.V." (as entered in the official registry for "Vereine")

We are carrying the "Internet Society" in our name for around 10 years now but also ISOC.DE as shortened version .
Both strings are present in all official lists and directories.
We are using www.isoc.de as our website for over 15 years now.

Looking at the website statistics for the last 12 months I see:
From all the people coming to our site using a search engine 40% were looking for a variant of ISOC and only 10% were looking for variants of "Internet Society"

Keeping ISOC.DE as main domain und continuing with www.isoc.de seems appropriate.
Perhaps adding internetsociety.de (or internet-society.de), if we can reach a solution with the current domain-holder,  as an additional entry for www may be OK.
Making it an additional path to our website and keeping isoc.de stable to keep all references usable seems an acceptable solution.

My guess is that it will only take another 10 years for "Internetsociety" to reach the usage level of ISOC - so enough time to do several more naming changes.

But even doing only the small step of an additional domain is costing a lot of effort and some money:
     - acquiring the name by finding an agreement with the current holder (possibly using money, taking a lot of personal effort in any case)
     - doing an official transfer of the domain
     - paying duties for the new domain
     - setting up DNS an additional background works to make the domain usable
     - changing the CMS, supporting second name correctly
     - changing content on the website to use new name in addition to old
     - changing/extending certificates or buying new ones to reflect the new name 
     - changing legal registration
    -  changing references in many places ...
And that covers only the web-part.

But the web is not everything.
We are using ISOCDE for twitter - changing that into INTERNETSOCIETYGERMANY would be really ugly (and who likes such long names in TWITTER??)
We are not on facebook - so no problem there
We are not on Youtube, googlegroups, linkedin, Xing, <name your favorite service here> - so no additional problems here

But there is one really huge other area - Ok - it is old fashioned - but I and many of our members like it:  EMAIL

Part of our offer to our members is the usage of myname at isoc.de for email (a free service to all our members).
This offered a stable email-address over many years and is realized as a forwarding service.
Several people are using their name at isoc.de address for example to keep a constant point of reference, even if they change business affiliation.
These email-addresses are buried deep into thousands of email-address-books, printed on thousands of business cards (yes they still exist), stored in million emails in private and public email-archives and thousands of archives of discussion/email-lists.
Rendering all these addresses useless by changing to yourname at internetsociety.de is absolutely out of discussion from my point of view.
I will not list all the necessary steps to add another domain to the email-forwarding, change the backend-processes doing the automated address-generation from our membership.-database, changing all our the mailing-lists, changing our business-cards, changing letter-head and and and.
 
So
   - my conclusion is: we will keep isoc.de as our main domain. 
   - we will continue to discuss if it is worth the effort to add another domain and wait for some (slow) change in usage.
   - we will use isoc.de for our email service and do no change there
   - we will not shut down isoc.de or stop using it in near future

Hans Peter