Who owns a place

Two kinds of corner

Every corner nobody has claimed is held in custody by whoever runs this instance. There is no such thing as an ownerless corner — only one whose custodian has not yet handed it over.

Claiming an administrative corner

Four steps. The first three are the evidence; the fourth is the claim itself, which will be refused until the evidence exists.

1. Register your organisation

   Create an organisation corner for the department, council or agency. This is the entity the claim is made by, not the place being claimed.

2. Prove you control an official domain

   Verify a domain by DNS TXT record or well-known file. Nothing weaker is accepted — a business-registry lookup shows an organisation exists, but only control of a namespace shows you are the one running it.

   The domain must be an official government domain for the corner's country. For Australia that means gov.au or a subdomain — vic.gov.au, transport.vic.gov.au. The accepted suffixes are held in a table an instance operator can correct, because the answer differs by jurisdiction and changes over time.

   Suffix matching is done on a label boundary, so notgov.au does not satisfy gov.au. Where a corner names a specific governing domain, only that domain and its subdomains count — nsw.gov.au cannot claim Victoria.

3. Run something this network can federate with

   Domain control alone proves ownership, not operation. An administrative corner also requires infrastructure the network can talk to: your own self-hosted instance, or an AAA server registered for your organisation and reachable over RadSec. Any LDAP-speaking directory this platform can federate against satisfies the same requirement.

   This is the difference between holding a name and running a place.

4. Claim the corner

   With both in place, the claim succeeds and provisioning runs as it would for any other corner: a Matrix room, a Space if it has children, and directory projection for members.

Overrides

Instance administrators can assign or release any corner, including one already held. Unclaimed corners are theirs in custody, so reassigning one is not a seizure — it is the custodian handing over what they already hold. Taking back a corner someone actively holds is a separate, deliberate action, recorded with a reason in the server log.

If you believe a corner is held by the wrong party, contact the administrators of this instance.

Why it works this way

The alternative — letting anyone claim au/victoria — makes the address meaningless. A person arriving at a state's corner should be able to assume they have reached the state, and the only thing that makes that assumption safe is requiring the claimant to demonstrate they are the ones already operating that jurisdiction's namespace and infrastructure.

It also means the requirement scales without anybody adjudicating: no application form, no approval queue, no judgement call about whether a claimant is legitimate. Either they control vic.gov.au and run a federating server, or they do not.