in fall 1996, josh smith '92 purchased the domain swil.org for swil use. it is maintained by josh on his computers, but we are encouraged to use it for swil stuff.
the webpages (section 4.5) are kept locally and mirrored onto swil.org because we have current student webmasters who want to update the pages more often than it would be practical to ask someone offsite to do it.
similarly, the swil e-mail list is kept locally as a mail alias by one of the presidents rather than as a majordomo list on swil.org because most of the current student listmembers are not active in swil, and if the list is local, it's easier for the presidents to keep track of who's graduating and needs to be removed, rather than swamping josh with 40 bouncing addresses once a year.
however, swil.org is used for a number of things which benefit swilfolk. since the domain is linked to us by name, josh generally writes to the presidents and asks whenever anyone has an idea for a new use for the domain, and presidents can approve or not as they see fit. 20
there are a couple of categories of things which are currently on swil.org.