For the past few years the CentOS Project has been holding IRC meetings for our various Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and other projects in the #centos-devel channel on the freenode IRC network. This has, for the most part, worked out fairly well. However, as this is a shared channel, at times things can become a bit hectic and confusing as people occasionally interrupt a meeting in progress. Not only does this break the flow of the meeting but it also injects noise into the logs that the project maintains for historical reference. This policy was also different from most other projects which have a dedicated "meetings" channel to be used for these purposes.
In order to address the issue the project has made the decision to transition meetings to the #centos-meeting channel. This is a dedicated channel to be used solely for meetings. We feel this will help alleviate any potential issues with interruptions and other distractions.
This channel is managed by the same group of people, our IRC Ops Team, as is #centos-devel and our channel bots are present to help as necessary. An additional bonus of this transition will be that the meeting bot (centbot) responsible for meeting oversight and logging will now be able to set the channel topic to reflect meeting status. This was not previously possible due to policy as we did not want to have the bot op'd unless absolutely necessary in a shared channel.
We are planning this transition for June 1st in order to give the stakeholders involved ample time to alert their communities of the change and to ensure we have made the necessary changes on our end to ensure a smooth transition for people who access the logs via the https://www.centos.org/minutes/ interface.
Any questions regarding this transition should be addressed either via the centos-devel mailing list or on the #centos-devel IRC channel on freenode.
Additionally people can reach out to me personally on IRC (Bahhumbug on freenode) or via email if they have questions or concerns regarding this or other CentOS IRC matters.
Thanks and see you in #centos-meeting :)