Open Stack

Greetings contributors & community members!

With recent events, the Technical Committee held an emergency meeting today (Wednesday, May 26th, 2021)
regarding Freenode IRC and what our decision would be [1]. Earlier in the week, the consensus amongst the TC
was to gather more information from the individual projects, and make a decision from there[2]. With #rdo,
#ubuntu, and #wikipedia having been hijacked, the consensus amongst the TC and the community members
who were able to attend the meeting was to move away from Freenode as soon as possible.  The TC agreed
that this move away from Freenode needs to be a community-wide move to the same, new IRC network for
all projects to avoid splintering of the community. As has been long-planned in the event of a contingency, we
will be moving to OFTC.

We recognize this is a contentious topic, and ultimately we seek to ensure community continuity before evolution
to something beyond IRC, as many have expressed interest in doing via Mailing List discussions. At this point, we
had to make a decision to solve the immediate problem in the simplest and most expedient way possible, so this is
that announcement. We welcome continued discussion about future alternatives on the other threads.

With this in mind, we suggest the following steps.

Everyone:
=======
1. Do NOT change any channel topics to represent this change. This is likely to result in the channel being taken
over by Freenode and will disrupt communications within our community.
2. Register your nicknames on OFTC [3][4]
3. Be *prepared* to join your channels on OFTC[4]. The OpenStack community channels have already been
registered on OFTC and await you.
4.  Continue to use Freenode for OpenStack discussions until the bots have been moved and the official cut-over
takes place this coming weekend. We anticipate using OFTC starting Monday, May 31st. 

Projects/Project Leaders:
====================
1.  Projects should work to get a few volunteers to staff their project channels on Freenode, for the near future to help
redirect people to OFTC. This should occur via private messages to avoid a ban.
2.  Continue to hold project meetings on Freenode until the bots are enabled on OFTC.
3.  Update project wikis/documentation with the new IRC network information. We ask that you consider referring to
the central contributor guide[5].
4.  The TC is asking that projects take advantage of this time of change to consider moving project meetings from
the #openstack-meeting* channels to their project channel.
5.  Please avoid discussing the move to OFTC in Freenode channels as this may also trigger a takeover of the channel.

We are working on getting our bots over to OFTC, and they will be moved over the weekend. Starting Monday May 31,
the bots will be on OFTC. Communication regarding this migration will take place on OFTC[4] in #openstack-dev, and
we're working on updating the contributor guide[5] to reflect this migration.

Sincerely,

The OpenStack TC and community leaders who came together to agree on a path forward.

[1]: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/openstack-irc
[2]: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/feedback-on-freenode
[3]: https://www.oftc.net/Services/#register-your-account
[4]: https://www.oftc.net/
[5]: https://docs.openstack.org/contributors/common/irc.html