ALV May 2022/Drew

IRC blessedness proposal

I propose we hereby bless the #techinc channel on irc.oftc.net as an official space of TechInc. We're already halfway there given that it's mentioned on the index page as a place to contact us.

Logistics

The channel is currently owned by the following people:

• amx109
• dreamer
• DrWhax
• Katje
• Wizzup
• madeddie (chanop)

We should reach out to these people and ask to transfer channel ownership to the board. Active members who are present in the channel should be added to the access list with opper permission, and non-members should be de-opped.

Maintenance of the access list may be burdensome for the board. Options to make it easier:

• Give all members master access to the channel instead of chanops, so that they can edit the access list. Bad idea because a disgruntled member could take advantage of this to kick everyone else out and drop the channel.
• The board delegates a handful of IRC masters who have permission to onboard new members as chanops.
• Teach shardik to add arbitrary users to the chanops list if asked to by an existing chanops and go with a low-overhead approach.
• Just leave it to the board and give them EVEN MORE WORK TO DO MWAHAHAHAHA

In any of these cases I don't foresee adding "set you up on IRC" to the new-member onboarding procedure - instead we should just get someone set up with ops whenever the issue comes up naturally.

Moderation

The purpose of this proposal is not to change how the channel is moderated, but just to formalize the channel as a techinc space and establish shared ownership among the members of techinc. Should we wish to discuss adopting a particular approach to moderation, it should be done as a follow-up proposal after the space is formally ours.

Regardless: here's a summary of the moderation bits as they stand before and after this proposal:

Status quo: everyone in the channel is an op, including many people who are not members of TechInc, who moderate at their discretion in an anarchist style.

Proposed change: ops is given out to active TechInc members only, who moderate at their discretion in an anarchist style.

Each member can kick or ban someone at their discretion, and the bannee can appeal to another member (or a sympathetic member can volunteer) to have it rolled back without any additional process. If it ends there, no harm done. If it turns into a bigger fight, invoke the TechInc grievance procedure to figure out how to restore balance to the force.

Note: this is not a formal policy, but rather an explanation of the emergent behavior of the system as-is.