TL;DR: let’s create service@gnome.org addresses for each online service/account that GNOME needs, to allow our sysadmins to recover them in case individuals go absent or lose credentials.
Oftentimes our applications need to consume online data throughout APIs which are protected by private credentials. We have had situations when we lost track of who has access to which accounts. We also have had “GNOME” branded accounts created in social media websites which later on got abandoned. The GNOME Foundation has ownership over the GNOME brand and should have a mechanism to recover these accounts in case their owners go absent or lose credentials.
What’s been done at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure/-/issues/577 sounds like a good approach.
For starters, at Initiatives/OnlineServicesAPIKeys - GNOME Wiki! we have a list of contributors that could attempt to switch their existing online accounts’ email addresses to the service@gnome.org format proposed here. They need to:
- File an issue requesting the creation of the email address alias at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/Infrastructure
- Switch* the online service address to the newly created one.
*I am aware that some of these services would require you to create a brand new account in order to change the address, for those I propose we create new accounts (with the service@gnome.org address) and update our applications to consume it while still keeping the existing API keys around for as long as a given version of the software that uses it is supported.
Thoughts?