Our official IRC channel is home of our public meetings, our outreach program, and the topic contains some of the most recent information we have available.  Our current IRC server is scored with downtimes, has extremely limited userbase, and no opportunities for becoming involved in other communities on the same server in the hopes of recruiting new blood.  The community we have in the irc is at the very least stagnant, and is possibly directly responsible for many users not becoming directly engaged.  With more local users it is possible that we can break this cycle with an increased pace of banter as well as a greater number of people 'just popping in'.

We also have some options for the implementation of neat bot services, including USPP news feed bots trivia bots, games, and more.  These kinds of things, while kitschy to some, are great for drawing a crowd that can be quickly educated in USPP policies and comings and goings; a crowd that would not be available to us on irc.pirate-party.us

Freenode is just one option we have available for a IRC server, but an extremely good one.  As the official chat home of almost the entire open source movement there are lots of places for us to become involved in.  Freenode is also monitored and maintained by some of the more righteous people on the net, who have an exception uptime stat as well as channel hosting and services that are reasonable and useful.

Other IRC networks can be proposed of course, and any good idea is a good idea.  It might be preferable to maintain 2 irc presences in order to keep a SSL connectable server up for the most official of communications. 

This is open for discussion and will be voted on at next meeting.  We need to decide what room(s) we want, with what rules and functions.  We also need to decide on some bot functions and goals.

Proposal:

31 days after this is voted on, the irc.pirate-party.us domain reference is to be removed from the registrar. This should happen AFTER the new room has been put into place.  If there is no movement by freenode in this time, the timeline will be pushed forward 31 days.

Within 7 days of voting this the channels that are decided on are to be populated by members, bots, and chanserv infrastructure (where applicable).

  Status

Still awaiting notification from freenode administration.