Community meeting on the future of our IRC presence

In response to current events concerning the Freenode Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, we would like to invite you to a community meeting on the future of both the FSF and GNU's official IRC channels.

The meeting will be held in the #fsf channel on the Freenode network on Thursday, May 27 from 13:00-14:30 EDT (17:00-18:30 UTC). The discussion will be moderated by members of the FSF staff, as well as GNU webmasters Amin Bandali and Jason Self.

Although no final decision will be made at this meeting, we're inviting you to use it as a space to share your thoughts on how the FSF and GNU should respond to recent changes in Freenode's organizational structure. Your feedback will be vital to helping us make respective decisions on whether to remain on Freenode, and if so, in what capacity.

A preliminary agenda follows:

• Current state and long-term future of the Freenode network;
• Assessing alternate IRC networks (Libera, OFTC); and
• Viability and freedom status of alternate communication networks (Matrix, XMPP).

Given the extensive community interest and somewhat sensitive nature of the issue, we expect the discussion to be moderated more than is usual for the channel. Participants are required to stay on topic, refrain from personal attacks against any of the parties involved, and carry on unrelated discussions in a separate channel while the meeting is taking place.

If you use IRC but aren't able to make the meeting time, please share your thoughts with us by email at campaigns@fsf.org.