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Scope
This document discusses the purpose of the irc.linuxchix.org server in fairly broad terms. It discusses having a team of volunteers to run it, how such a team is appointed and maintains itself, and the responsibilities of such a team.
Particular details of discouraging unwanted behaviour by users are out of scope for this document. These are to be decided, possibly by precedent, and probably informally, between the IRC channel operators, and server operators where technical measures are needed.
Software choices, such as IRC server software, are out of scope for this document. These are to be decided by the sysadmin team, probably with input from the server operators.
Definitions
LinuxChix
LinuxChix is the community on linuxchix.org, together with its listed regional chapters. Its scope is "a community for women who like Linux, and for anyone who wants to support women in computing."
Membership of the community is defined as being a member of any linuxchix.org forum, or a member of a regional chapter who supports our goals.
IRC admin roles
Server operators: IRC users with o:lines and associated powers. These are software dependant, but generally include the system-wide ability to alter channel properties (such as operators, channel status) and to ban users from the entire server.
Channel operators: IRC users with +o mode in a particular channel, or the ability to gain it automatically (such as by asking an IRC services bot), and associated powers. These generally include altering channel properties
Channel owners: IRC users who have the ability to grant other users permanent channel operator status. This concept only makes sense where there is an IRC services bot or other means of giving a user permanent operator status.
Purpose of irc.linuxchix.org
irc.linuxchix.org is an IRC server for the LinuxChix community, as defined above. It is not an IRC server for the general public, nor is it for use by communities and projects not associated with LinuxChix, even where those communities and projects agree with our general goals and philosophy.
This server purpose is NOT intended to exclude: - people who are members of the community discussing, working on, or embarking on outside projects on our server - social use of the server - IRC-only members (people who aren't on the mailing lists or other forums)
It IS intended to exclude users and projects who have never intended to be part of LinuxChix from using our server.
Membership of the LinuxChix community is mostly self-defined and can be difficult to judge from the outside, so in practice this rule is designed as a self-check by users after they are familiar with the community.
In the case of projects that aren't affiliated with LinuxChix and which seem to have people who aren't our members working on them on our server, this policy may, hopefully rarely, be used to ask that some discussions or activities be moved to general purpose IRC servers.
User behaviour
Participants in all forums managed by LinuxChix, including the IRC server, are expected to follow our rules: 1. be polite 2. be helpful
In addition, certain channels may add restriction to scope (for example, restriction to technical topics) or restrictions on membership (for example, restriction to women only) at the discretion of the channel owner(s).
Channel operators
In general, channel operators are responsible for ensuring that their channels remain polite and helpful.
When new channels are founded, if they are intended to be long term they should be registered with the services and a reasonable number of operators should be appointed. All operators should know commands, or have access to a ready reference for operator commands, including bot commands to get operator privileges.
All channel operators can contact server operators about serverwide bans or other actions against badly disruptive users. Users may contact them also, but channel operators are best placed to observe in-channel behaviour that may merit a ban.
Main community channels
These are the permanent channels that go with the main linuxchix.org community (as opposed to with chapters or subprojects).
The main community's channels are: - #linuxchix - #grrls-only - #beginner - #tech - #programming
Operator responsibilities
Enforce "be polite, be helpful" in the channels. Be available for approach with problems with the channel, particularly social ones, and be interested in solving them. Keep an eye out for problems that need to be escalated to the server ops. Operators will be added to the private irc-admin@linuxchix list.
Appointment of channel operators
These channels, like our mailing lists (and as opposed to our chapters and subprojects) are run by the main volunteers group. They should be registered by an administrative IRC user, rather than a regular user and operators should be appointed much like mailing list admins are:
1. an initial set is chosen by the coordinator from available volunteers (with some emphasis on geographical spread) 2. when a channel operator does not or cannot do their role any more, a new operator is chosen (with some emphasis on geographical spread)
There probably will be some overlap with server operators among these people, but it probably should not be complete overlap.
Removal of channel operators
Like mailing list admins and other volunteers, the coordinator or her appointee should periodically review the operators for continued activity so that the number of operators reflects *active* operators.
Server operators
Server operators, who possess technical powers over channels and users on the server, have overall responsibility for maintaining the server as a private server for the LinuxChix community. This divides into two areas of responsibility:
1. technical caretaking, such as maintaining services and connectivity where their powers allow them to and promptly asking the sysadmin team for help when they need it
2. server level social caretaking, such as excluding destructive users from the network and possibly sources of destructive users (such as anonymising services)
The server operators are responsible to the community at large for maintaining this resource for them.
Specifically, the coordinator of LinuxChix or her appointee in this role act as overall oversight. This oversight should be invoked rarely, but might, for example, be called on to resolve ongoing disputes between the server operators, or to resolve complaints the community has about the server operators.
Contacting server operators
Server operators will be on a private email list irc-admin@linuxchix.org They will discuss server-wide settings and policy implementation there, and can be contacted there when needed.
They are not beholden to channel operators or any other users to implement requested settings or bans. But they should see it as their job to solve serious issues that come to their attention, if these can be solved at a server level.
Number of server operators
There will be approximately 6 server operators. There should be approx 2 operators from each of the three following timezone areas:
1. North and South America 2. Europe and Africa 3. Asia and Australasia
As a small volunteer group, we can't guarentee a server operator be online at all times, but these numbers make it reasonably likely that one will either be online or contactable via email or other means without having such a large group that they cannot usually make decisions by consensus.
Appointment of server operators
Because we only have a fairly small number of regular users (perhaps 70 in April 2007), we cannot rely solely on people with previous server operator experience to be server operators.
The initial set of server operators under this policy will be appointed by the coordinator. After that, they maintain their numbers by appointing and training new operators as operators leave.
IRC regulars who have a particular interest in maintaining the IRC server for the LinuxChix community will also need to take on this role. They will need to be confident that they can learn the needed commands promptly and have them ready for use at the needed time.
The #linuxchix operators will in general probably be a good source of new server operators.
Removal of server operators
When a server operator is temporarily or permanently unable to do her role, she should inform the other server operators, ideally with some notice, so that a new operator can be appointed (temporarily or permanently) to replace her. This includes when a server operator decides that she no longer has time to be online on the server regularly.
If a server operator drops contact with the community, or is offline for a long period of time without making arrangements for at least a temporary replacement, the server operators should replace her.
Operators who have left, temporary or permanently, should have their o:line removed. Only active server operators have active o:lines.
In the event that a dispute between operators, or between operators and the community, cannot be resolved by other means operators may be removed by the coordinator or her appointee.
End proposed policy
Rationale
First: why? LinuxChix has always relied on donations. You all donate your time as community members, and some as list admins, IRC admins, website authors, sysadmins, etc. I donate my time as coordinator.
In addition, we have always had donated server resources: hardware and bandwidth. From 2001–2006 server resources for lists, website and IRC were donated by Jenn and Dancer Vesperman, with an additional IRC server donated during part of this time by Maria Blackmore. At present, funding for our server hardware has been donated by Intel. The physical location, hardware management, bandwidth, and on the ground server administration has been donated by the OSU Open Source Lab.
We owe it to ourselves and all other donations of time, resources and/or money, and to all LinuxChix, to manage our resources as responsibly as we can, given limitations of volunteer capability.
Purpose of irc.linuxchix.org
A small number of people have expressed some concern to me, very occasionally and generally privately, about LinuxChix resources being used for private projects, or about participants in them who reject any idea of actually being members of LinuxChix.
I *don't* want to propose a "are you a member of LinuxChix?" test at the door here. Some people will come to the channels not knowing much about us, not knowing who we are, and wanting to see. That's more than fine. What we should discourage though is long term or permanent use of our server by people, particularly people who have organised themselves into projects, who have considered and explicitly rejected the idea of calling themselves "members of LinuxChix" OR who seem to have adopted the term only so that they can use our IRC server (rather than say, because they like us and our goals).
Proposal: Public logging not acceptable
I would like to have a sentence added that publishing logs from LinuxChix IRC is not acceptable (of course unless everyone involved gave permission). I know that we can't really prevent it if a malicious user does it anyway, but at least it should be actively discouraged and have consequences for participation in LinuxChix by someone publishing a log without permission. -- xTina