Monthly General Meeting, May 2024

by She

Confirmation of new members

This meeting voted to confirm the organization membership of the staff member invited after the previous meeting.

Propositions and motions

Add a venue clause or similar to our policies

This meeting discussed adding a forum selection clause to our policies. As we are a Swedish organization, the clause would specify that legal action taken against us must be done through the Swedish court system. While such clauses are not universally enforceable, our understanding is that it would be enforceable in the EU in general.

No specific wording was decided upon, and ultimately this meeting agreed to postpone this topic. Our policy does not have a severability clause, lack of which could lead to an argument that our TOS as a whole is void because of an unenforceable venue clause.

Are namespaces working for us as documented?

Recently, a few channels that were incorrectly in the single-# namespace were denied staff assistance registering with ChanServ. Staff do not typically close unregistered single-# channels whose participants adhere to the network’s acceptable use policies, but do not support them either. During this meeting, an argument was made that it is generally better to allow those channels to register than it is to let them persist unregistered because the channel’s members do not agree to a redirect.

This meeting decided on no particular course of action, instead agreeing to revisit this topic next month with a concrete policy amendment. This meeting also affirmed that that successful group registration cannot be a condition for registering a single-# channel.

Should we do an expired NickServ/ChanServ registration purge?

Previous meetings have brought up name and channel squatting as an issue that needs improvement for the benefit of new users of the network. New users are usually not aware of the nickname and channel expiration policies, and purging old registrations would free up some channels that are effectively opless. In particular, there were a large number of registrations in the few weeks immediately following Libera.Chat opening to the public that have now been expired for around 3 years.

This meeting decided on no particular course of action, but expressed a strong preference to only free up the landrush registrations. A specific proposal will be created and presented for internal discussion.

Late agenda items

There was one late agenda item that was approved at the start of this meeting.

Replace an instance of “defense” with “defence” in policies

Our style guide states that our website content (including policies) is to be written in British English, and “defense” is the American English spelling of that word. While our bylaws do not require MGM approval for typo fixes in our policies, there is precedent to seek it anyway.

This meeting approved the typo fix.