Activity Report 2022 - Projects and Community

The projects and community team (PaC) manages the relationship between the Libera.Chat volunteer staff and projects and communities that use our network. It takes care of registrations and onboarding for projects and communities that would like to have an official representation on Libera.Chat. In addition to that, we keep up communications and good relationships both on the network and also through other channels, such as social media.

Project and community registration activity

As expected, we had fewer registrations than during the initial phase of Libera.Chat. However, we are still getting new projects and communities of all sizes and from various areas registered.

The biggest and probably most famous one among them is the GNOME community, mostly known for their desktop environment, but also the applications and libraries powering it. They had their own IRC network in the past, which they now left for Libera. The migration was almost seamless and without bigger issues, and we were able to give them a well working infrastructure and a warm welcome.

There were also various other projects and communities that found their new home with us, from FOSS platformer games and level editors to build systems and libraries, hackerspaces and Linux User Groups.

Thanks to the great work of everyone, we are now just a dozen below having 1000 registered projects and communities! Backlog grew a bit, with currently around 70 request that still need to be looked into. This slowdown was adressed in our last meeting and we are looking for ways to get people who are motivated and have the needed time at hand to handle the remaining tickets.

Social media and communications

Our social media accounts are still growing, with roughly 2000 followers (+500 since last year) on mastodon, still around 4000 (stable) on twitter and around 320 (+100) on facebook.

Team internal organisation and decisions

Currently the team consists of 17 members. We unfortunately lost some members who left the Libera.Chat organisation as a whole, but we also gained two new members during the year.

PaC still only hold meetings on an as-needed base instead of a regular schedule, since most work can be done ad hoc and there is rarely the need for a bigger coordination. We hold a meeting to onboard new members, and decided that in the future we can also onboard them without a meeting. We also discussed a more complicated project registration during a meeting, where we were able to benefit from a quick live discussion with multiple members and opinions, which saved a lot of time compared to doing it on IRC or via e-mail. Most registrations, however, are still mostly straightforward cases, so that one or two pair of eyes are sufficient.

Outlook

We hope to be able to reduce the backlog a bit in 2023 as progress slowed down compared to the initial period. Other than that, we are looking forward to keep up our work with the communities, which is well received and we are happy to say that projects and communities on Libera give us positive feedback and are happy to use our services.

We all are doing our best to keep that up!