Over the past year there have been a number of fairly significant and at times disturbing changes with the Australian ccTLD. While some focus has been on the current plans to drop AusRegistry / Neustar from providing the registry backend services, other people have been raising concerns around the organisation’s governance. Australian domain investor Ned O’Meara has been writing quite extensively on the various changes to auDA over on his aptly named blog.
However in the last couple of days a former auDA board member Josh Rowe has voiced serious concerns around the organisation’s transparency.
Why?
Because auDA have removed all the board minutes from their website.
Here’s a screenshot of how the board page used to look (via Archive.org):
The screenshot above is from 2016 and looks quite different to what you can see today:
Josh believes that he can use a freedom of information request (FOI) to the Australian government in order to get the minutes and other material either reinstated or at least released to the public. However the cost for an FOI in Australia is close to $700. Due to the cost Josh is trying to raise the funds necessary via crowd source funding site GoFundMe.
If you’re interested in helping the campaign you can read more about it and donate here.
