Recent Events and Future Changes

Many of you have been asking questions about the recent rash of high-profile staff resignations, and we feel we owe you all both an explanation and an apology.

First, the explanation: in short, it's become clear over recent months that freenode has lost its way somewhat, when compared to the ideals and goals that we were created with. A growing sense of disillusionment amongst those of us who remember the olden days, when we were far more friendly, approachable and engaged in the communities we were set up to serve, has recently come to a head. Naturally, when some of these people decided they could no longer continue with the way things had become, it was time for us to think long and hard about what had gone wrong and what we should do about it.

And so, to the apology. We're uncomfortably aware that freenode was set up with the strong idea that the projects and communities which use it should be the first, and often the only, priority. We've lost sight of that, and we're sorry. We'll be doing our best, from now on, to get back in touch with the ideals that made freenode such a great place.

This won't be easy for us, as we've got years of bad habits to break, but hopefully you should start seeing some improvements in the coming months. If you see anything that we're not doing that would help your communities, please tell us and we'll try our best to find a way to make it happen. You might see a bit of chaos or inconsistency while we try to find our way around again, but please try to bear with us and we hope you'll see things get better in time.

And finally, because we're conscious that a lack of clarity around our leadership structure has not helped matters, we've decided to set out unambiguously how the staff management structure will work from now on. Our activities and operations will be split roughly into four areas, each with a designated lead.

• mist is head of staff, and in charge of day to day network operations and general staff issues.

• kloeri is head of infrastructure, in charge of making sure that the network continues to run in a usable fashion and that we have the right hardware and server platforms in place to provide the services we want to.

• spb is head of development, in charge of the software platforms that we use to run the network.

• christel is head of projects and communities, and also the overall project lead in charge of the other three heads. She'll be trying to make sure that we get back the levels of engagement that we once had with the projects we're here to serve.

These four, together, will take any decisions that affect the future direction of freenode. While they each have their own area of focus, feel free to contact any of us about any issues you may have -- we try to keep an open (virtual) door policy.