Monthly General Meeting, April 2025

by amdj

Propositions and Motions

Staff inactivity policy

Up until this meeting, there was no formal policy for whether a staff member’s privileges should be suspended when they have been inactive for a period of time.

This meeting discussed establishing such a policy, came up with a list of staff that have been inactive, and proposed that we reach out to them to see if they still wish to be privileged staff members.

Ultimately, the inactivity period was set at 3 months, and 7 staff members ended up being deprivileged. They still retain their organisation membership, and access to all non-IRC infrastructure such as their e-mail inboxes, but no longer have any privileged access to information on the IRC network. They can regain these privileges at any time upon request.

Bylaws change for membership change transparency

An amendment to the bylaws to make membership changes and terminations require a notification to the membership, rather than the board, was briefly discussed, continuing from a previous meeting.

This bylaws amendment was ultimately approved.

---
 bylaws.md | 10 +++++++---
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/bylaws.md b/bylaws.md
index 0fe2d46..589dc26 100644
--- a/bylaws.md
+++ b/bylaws.md
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 title: Libera Chat Bylaws
 ---
 
-v 2024-12-20, organisation number 802535-6448
+v 2025-04-26, organisation number 802535-6448
 
 ## Organisation and purpose
 
@@ -49,7 +49,8 @@ v 2024-12-20, organisation number 802535-6448
 
 4. There are two levels of membership: ordinary member, and quorum member.
    Members of either type may at any time switch between the two types of
-   member status by notifying the board. The board are always quorum members.
+   member status by notifying the membership. The board are always quorum
+   members.
 
 5. Any quorum member who, in any two full, consecutive calendar months, does
    not attend any Monthly General Meetings, becomes an ordinary member
@@ -57,10 +58,13 @@ v 2024-12-20, organisation number 802535-6448
 
 6. Membership is terminated if:
 
-   - The member withdraws their membership, or
+   - The member withdraws their membership by notifying the membership, or
 
    - The member is suspended.
 
+7. All membership changes must be documented in an archived and searchable
+   record.
+
 ## Decisions
 
 1. The decision-making organs of the organisation ranked from highest to

Network policy change for misinformation

The meeting continued discussions at length about a network policy change to discourage the presence of IRC channels that promote misinformation that can put users at significant risk (e.g. financial, medical, or legal topics).

This policy amendment was ultimately approved.

Other Questions

Handling of domain names

Due to a loss of contact with the sponsor of our primary domain name and the impeding expiration of said domain name, the board convened an emergency board meeting prior to this MGM to decide to transfer the domain name to another registrar that was willing to sponsor it.

It was noted during this process that there were other domain names in our posession that were not sponsored, and that there is a domain name that we have that cannot be transferred to our new chosen registrar.

The meeting discussed whether we should drop (i.e. stop paying for) the non-sponsored domain names we have but do not use, and whether we should transfer our other eligible domain names to the same registrar.

A selection of registrars were also briefly discussed due to the current registrar not supporting transfers for one of our domain names, but ultimately we chose to defer acting upon any of this until they are closer to expiration.

Increasing the length limit for IRC real names

At the moment, the IRC server software sets a hard limit of 50 characters for IRC real names. This field tends to get used by bridges to indicate the user name of the client behind the bridge, and is frequently truncated due to a combination of user name and domain name length.

A brief discussion about the feasibility of raising the length limit was had. It was pointed out that at the moment it is used as a buffer length, and so cannot just be raised without causing the IRC servers to crash when they are relinked.