TransitCamp domain e-mail addresses

[Quinn Fung]

Hey there,

Hi from the left coast! Just dropping a quick line to say we've
finally gotten our acts together and have a TransitCamp planned for
December 8th! Tell all your Vancouver friends, or come on over if
you're in the hood. We're juuuust confirming our venue so I'm not
going to say where it is until it's definite, but it will be familiar
to some of you who hang out with the Vancouver BarCamp crew. ;)

Now, my other question - do we trust Google Apps for Domains to remain
free so that we could use it to give us pl...@transitcamp.org e-mail
addresses? I for one, think it would be awesome...

For those who may not know what that is, Google Apps for Domains is
basically Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets for
every e-mail address on a domain - so instead of getting an email
address with the @gmail.com ending, you can have @yourdomainname.com
ending. I think the free version of Google Apps for Domains comes with
50 email addresses, and every address gets access to the above listed
applications. Thus far, it's free.

It escapes me right now who actually maintains the transitcamp.org
domain (David Crow, in da house?) so I thought I'd throw it out here
to see if anyone here can help me out. We'll also want to be hooking
up our stikipad wiki up to vancouver.transitcamp.org soon too; did we
ever come up with a mechanism for deciding how that will happen?

Cheerio,

Quinn (now with more Karen)

[Jay]

On Nov 15, 11:29 pm, Quinn Fung <ka...@countablyinfinite.ca> wrote:

> Hi from the left coast! Just dropping a quick line to say we've
> finally gotten our acts together and have a TransitCamp planned for
> December 8th!

Congrats! That's fantastic :)

> Now, my other question - do we trust Google Apps for Domains to remain
> free so that we could use it to give us pl...@transitcamp.org e-mail
> addresses? I for one, think it would be awesome...

I think we can probably trust it -- if it does go pay, they might offer
a free version to non-profits or community groups anyway. What needs
to happen in order to do it?

[Mark Kuznicki]

I think this is a great idea. I use Google Apps for my remarkk.com
domain, it's swell.

A little configuration and then David can give other folks admin
access to run it.

[Quinn Fung]

My reply seems to have not gone through, so I'll give it another try -
apologies if this is a duplicate.

Jay said:

> I think we can probably trust it -- if it does go pay, they might offer
> a free version to non-profits or community groups anyway. What needs
> to happen in order to do it?

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html

Basically, there's a form to take some information from David (or
whoever it is) as the administrator or primary contact. There's a bit
of code to insert onto a page on the TransitCamp domain to confirm
that we have page editing privileges to the domain. Then there's some
fooling around with MX and CNAME records to set to get the mail
forwarding properly, so whoever's got the domain name registration on
transitcamp.org (also assuming it's David?) will get to play with
that. I think that's the extent of it, unless we wanted to activate
any of the other features.

An addendum, they actually do have an "educational" / non-profit
offering that's free and designated specifically for US registered non-
profits. I don't mind standard, I have a black box in my mind that
renders me immune to advertising. :D

Once that happens, whoever's administrating can create accounts for
us...@transitcamp.org, and those will all be gmail accounts with the
standard gmail goodness.

Cheers,

Quinn