Lukasz Damentko wrote:
> Fair enough. Let me wrap up the IRC part.
> 
> 1. I'd like to ask Council to discuss possible reactions to our
> developer being banned from Freenode without providing us with a
> reason. The situation looks like one of Freenode staffers overreacted
> over something Chris said during previous Council meeting and banned
> him to prevent him from attending next meetings when he was supposed
> to provide more information on the CoC topic. The ban was removed
> after an hour, but they still refuse to provide us with reasons for it
> which looks like (mostly because we weren't shown any sane
> justification for the ban) a cover up operation. It would be good if
> Council officially protested against that ban and demanded a detailed
> explanation from Freenode staff.
> 
> 2. I want Council to consider moving their meetings somewhere where
> third parties can't control who in Gentoo can attend and who can't.
> Like our own small and created just for this purpose IRC server. A
> situation when a third party may disallow our developer from attending
> a meeting without even telling us why isn't the healthiest one. We
> should be independent from such decisions of third parties so they
> can't politically influence Council decisions by removing people who
> are inconvenient for them. Now when it (most probably) happened once,
> we have no other choice but to believe it's possible it will happen
> again.
> 
> 3. I want Council to consider creating and using irc.gentoo.org alias
> instead of irc.freenode.net in our docs, news items and so on. The
> alias would allow us to move out of the network more easily should we
> ever decide to do so. Debian did exactly the same a couple of months
> ago prior to them moving out to OFTC
> (http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060604)  so maybe it would be a
> good idea to have this for Gentoo too. Infra (Shyam Mani) say it isn't
> a problem at all to create and maintain it, we in fact already have
> something like this pointing at Freenode, it would be just a question
> of updating that alias and updating our docs with it. It would
> increase our independence from Freenode and make future network
> switching much easier should we ever decide it's time to part our ways
> with our current IRC service provider.
> 
> The intention behind all three items is to increase our independence
> from our IRC service provider.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Lukasz Damentko
> 
> 

1) IRC
I second all the points made above. And I want to add another reason for
considering to move away from Freenode: we have been waiting for ages to
get more/new Group Contacts, but Freenode has been unable to help us,
being severely understaffed and backlogged. We should not have to rely
on just one person being a Group Contact for Gentoo.

2) Continued presence of forcefully retired devs
It really baffles me that some developers are forcefully retired for
anti-social behavior, but are not consequently banned from the places
where they display this behavior, such as our MLs and IRC channels. What
good is it to retire developers, but allow them to continue to be
disruptive? I would like the Council to decide for a change in our
policy on this point.

Regards,

Ben de Groot