This has been discussed in the past on IRC but never went anywhere.
I think we should have a more scalable DNS naming structure. The flat space we have at the moment won't scale particularly well - we've already had a collision with Manchester, UK and Manchester, US.
So I think we should move to a simple two level system.
What about using the existing geographical structure of top level domain names? It would require the purchase of a domain for each country but for the little that it actually costs these days (at least for .uk) is this really a problem. I suppose you may also like to keep everything under the same TLD but it would solve the issue of having lots of levels in the domain name.
Whether we want to enforce existing guides to switch over I don't know, but we should at least put in redirects.
I like the suggestion of disambiguation pages when we do get a clash, with redirects up until then.
Currently openguides.org is associated with Earle's personal account with gandi.net. I suggest that we get an Openguides-specific account with someone (them, or Black Cat Networks - my employer, I know we can do this, for example). That would give us a web-based update interface to which nominated individuals could have access.
We then have a wiki page that documents the DNS entries, who requested them, when they were added, who by, etc etc, to keep track of things. It's not a technically neat solution but is very easy to implement and provides a more stable DNS platform than something custom would (for example zone files in SVN were mentioned).
I'd be willing to host DNS (and could probably also provide secondary) for the domain and could script up a web interface where users could be given passwords to make changes and document them.