Recent Events and Future Changes
blog.freenode.net
blog.freenode.net
About the only reason it was worth mentioning the drama part in the blog post was that we'd been inundated with people asking about the resignations (since they were visible due to cloak changes), and now we're getting a fraction a many people asking about "what else aren't you telling us?", which is overall still a lot less annoying.
For anybody not directly involved in running the network, what'll be more interesting will be the changes made over time, which I'm not able to predict but am looking forward to watching.
Often you'll be able to speak directly to a dev or a knowledgeable user of an opensource project.
IRC/freenode - an important arrow in your problem solving quiver.
One of the early lessons I needed to learn as a manager, is that my inside view is just one view. Getting the view of others is much more valuable.
Makes it sound like it has something to do with http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/. :)
(I say this with experience running infrastructure for an IRC network, albeit orders of magnitude smaller)