nullcortex

Well folks, UDS is over.  I had a lot of fun and got to know a bunch of people who I had only spoken to IRC before.  The IRC Council itself had a total of three sessions over the course of the week.  We have a lot of work ahead of us, some of our tasks are as follows:

Prune Channel Access Lists:

Currently about half of the people on our core channel access lists are inactive. Some of them now contribute to other parts of Ubuntu, while others simply do not contribute at all. Soon we will be using Launchpad teams to ensure that our operators are active and interested. Eventually we’d like to have an automated process whereby operators with expired team memberships are automatically removed from the access lists.

Develop an Application Process for New Operators:

Presently when we feel that we need more operators we use a set of undocumented guidelines to pick from a pool of IRC helpers.  The IRCC will work towards creating a documented set of criteria that potential operators must meet.

Document Operator Assessment Process:

We currently do not have a written, or scheduled, assessment process for current operators.  With the team membership expiration dates going in, we will need a way to assess operators who wish to keep their channel privileges.  Working from the operator guidelines and the new operator application procedures, we will put together an assessment document that we may compare our current ops against.

Membership Approval:

As its stands now, people who contribute extensively via IRC are left to apply for membership via their respective regional membership boards.  We will be working with the Community Council to come up with a set of IRC-specific requirements so that we may approve these new members directly.

IRC Tracker:

We also have a long list of new suggested features for our IRC Tracker (previously called BantrackerTwo):

• MyBans page
• Mode generator for ban removals
• Concept of relationships between events
• Anonymous access
• Links to the appeals process for banned users
• Aliases/tags for nicks
• API
• Better bot to tracker interface
• Bot nagging for comments after an event occurs
• Human readable URLs throughout
• Improved interface for Encyclopedia (factoid) plugins
• Suggested factoid queue moderation

As you can see, we’re going to be very busy in the next few months.