As some of you may be aware, the former head of Freenode ltd., the holding company for the Freenode IRC network, sold the organization to a third party under terms that hadn't been disclosed to staff. Most Freenode staff (e.g. 0, 1) have resigned their posts and are urging communities that use Freenode for IRC to abandon the network. This has become even more urgent given recently reported routine abuses of power 2 and a rollback on Freenode policy banning hate speech. 3
Former Freenode staffers have founded a new IRC network, Libera.chat. A handful of us (thanks, jeff) have started to set up a new #code4lib channel there (ircs://irc.libera.chat/code4lib), although there's work to do to relocate zoia, the Code4lib IRC bot, and update the web pages (this PR).
As always, this is a reminder that we don't have good processes or policies for dealing with these sorts of changes in the Code4lib community. This was not a unilateral decision, but one informed by a number of other folks in IRC.
As some of you may be aware, the former head of Freenode ltd., the holding company for the Freenode IRC network, sold the organization to a third party under terms that hadn't been disclosed to staff. Most Freenode staff (e.g. 0, 1) have resigned their posts and are urging communities that use Freenode for IRC to abandon the network. This has become even more urgent given recently reported routine abuses of power 2 and a rollback on Freenode policy banning hate speech. 3
Former Freenode staffers have founded a new IRC network, Libera.chat. A handful of us (thanks, jeff) have started to set up a new #code4lib channel there (
ircs://irc.libera.chat/code4lib), although there's work to do to relocate zoia, the Code4lib IRC bot, and update the web pages (this PR).As always, this is a reminder that we don't have good processes or policies for dealing with these sorts of changes in the Code4lib community. This was not a unilateral decision, but one informed by a number of other folks in IRC.