Comment 1 for bug 251877

The problem here is our data model only has one property for project registration and ownership. That attribute is called 'owner'. It is displayed in different contexts as 'owner', 'registrant', and 'maintainer'. If a single piece of data is asked to represent three distinct concepts it will often be inaccurate.

The Gnome example you cite shows that it is owned by the 'registry admins' a group whose purpose is to register projects in Lanchpad and then turn them over to their rightful owners. They have done that for Gnome but it looks like no one from the Gnome Foundation has claimed ownership.

My proposal to fix this and related bugs is to change our data model to have the following attributes:

* registrant - the person who originally registered the project or project group. It is immutable, non-null and is set at registration time.
When this field is added the registrant will be set to the same value as the owner for existing projects.

* owner - the person or team who currently owns the project. The current owner or a Launchpad admin can reassign ownership to another person or team at any time. Upon creation it is set to the registrant.