[Foundation-l] Status of cloak requests

[Alex]

GDonato wrote:
> Adam Brookes wrote:
>> Whilst I appreciate the circumstances, it suprises me that one person being
>> injured brings the whole process of requesting cloaks to a grinding halt. If
>> this problem is with Freenode then perhaps it should be asked, why do we use
>> Freenode rather than another network or indeed our own official unofficial
>> IRC network. It seems as if there is an additional layer of burecracy that
>> could be removed by doing this ourselves. I'm sure we could find both the
>> hardware and the people to manage such a network and it would of course
>> offer us more control on other issues. Is there any particular reason why
>> the Foundation doesn't want to get invovled with IRC?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Adambro
>>
> 
> I think Wikimedia having its own IRC setup would probably be quite a 
> good idea. I agree with your point that it could remove bueraucracy and 
> irc.wikimedia.org already exists (albeit only for recent changes etc.). 
> It seems it would put the ball back in our own hands as it were. I doubt 
> there are any issues regarding expense or staffing (but I may be wrong) 
> so go for it, I would say.
> 

I remember a few weeks ago, someone asked Tim Starling about this in 
IRC, or a similar question, like why only the rc bot can talk in the 
irc.wikimedia channels. I don't have the logs from then to give a direct 
quote, but the reason was basically: its too much work (running services 
for registering nicks and channels, staffing, setup, maintenance, etc), 
for something we already get from freenode.

-- 
Alex (w:en:User:Mr.Z-man)