[OHM] News regarding OpenHistoricalMap

[Rob H Warren]

Initially, Open Historical Map was graciously supported by Topomancy LLC who paid for both domain and hosting services for a number of years. Since 2013, various unfortunate events have hampered OHM: catastrophic disk failures, tragic deaths, predatory NGO's, loss of data, frustrated contributors and significant donor fatigue in terms of the people-time required to run the project.

With Topomancy closing its doors, the domain name and DNS server need rehosting and the Wikiwar Heritage Council has stepped up to the plate to be the custodian for these. The Wikiwar Heritage Council is a registered non-profit organization with the preservation of historical data as its primary mission making it the ideal vessel to ensure continuity. Its board of directors, which includes OHM task manager maintainer Bert de Bruijn, has committed itself to ensuring ongoing management of the DNS and a private donation will cover costs for the foreseeable future. A secondary fallback DNS server is being stood up by long-standing OHM contributor Richard Welty.

If you need a change or addition to the openhistoricalmap.org domains, please enter an issue in the website github at [1] and tag the issue with the "DNS Ops" label. Someone will respond shortly. With this new support we believe OHM will be able to grow into a much more stable project while avoiding any more frustrations. 

In closing, I'd like to thank Topomancy, namely Shekhar Krishnan, Sanjay Bhangar and Tim Waters for believing in the project from the beginning and supporting it for so long, the Wikiwar Heritage Council for stepping in and everyone who's worked on OHM, sometimes at significant personal cost, because things needed to get done.

[1] https://github.com/OpenHistoricalMap/ohm-website/issues