You all know the IRC channel, no? #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net? And its small army of related channels? http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_channels has the dirt. Up until this point, our relationship with Freenode has largely been ad hoc. Eloquence registered #wikipedia some time ago, and for a long time that and the other channels were just managed as necessary. However, Freenode also allows groups to set up an official contact with Wikipedia. A few months ago, I took some initiative, filled out a little form and answered a phone call and got designated as Wikipedia's Group Contact with Freenode. (I wanted a .wikipedia username cloak, and you needed a group contact to manage that, so...) I've used this position mostly to give out similar IRC cloaks. Recently, I used my group-contact status with Freenode to gain temporary operator status to ban Michael and Lir, who had just joined the channel to brag about their recent exploits on WP:RFA, and to stir up ill will. Profanities were being thrown. About this time, Fire had also set himself up as a contact, using the same credentials (some sysop power, et cetera), and has undertaken to straighten out the Wikipedia-related channels. In particular, he got added as a level-30 contact in #wikipedia, and added several people with ChanServ access which would allow them to become operators. While this is useful, and the people added were trustworthy, this brings up a salient point. We don't just want anyone- or even any sysop- to be able to come on and reorganize the channel structure or anything. I think it would be useful if the Board could appoint an Official Freenode Liason to be the #1 group contact, and if we could decide how we would like to have these sorts of affairs managed. The contact has a few properties: he (or she) can contact Freenode staff and ask for a change in ownership of a project-related channel, for access to the channel, for temporary operator status, or anything related to the projects' channels which he cannot do by himself. Additionally, the contact is responsible for asking Freenode staff to apply "cloaks" for the users' hostmasks. I have used this and page on the English wikipedia to set up people with username "Foo" as "Foo.wikipedia" on IRC. This provides a way to prove that you are who you say you are on IRC. However, we are running into the problem of language-related requests, and since we don't have a unified login, there is room for confusion. At present I have reccomended to Fire that we keep cloaks a per-language setting, and having user.XX.wikipedia as a cloak, where XX is a language code, *except* if the language is English, in which case it is not used (although we could change this if desired). There has also been talk about a Q: line for the Recent Changes bots' nicknames. This would prevent someone using the <enrc> or categorically similar nicknames without authorization. I think that all of these issues could be best resolved if we had official sanction for at least one #1 Head Honcho group contact, and a good place to manage these affairs. -- You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.