Add public minutes for the Jan 2026 MGM

Author: TheDaemoness

content/_minutes/2026-01-30-public.md

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+---
+title: Monthly General Meeting, January 2026
+author: She
+excerpt: >
+    Accepting direct donations, election platform choice,
+    deferring privacy policy update to next meeting, removing VACATION
+---
+
+## Propositions and Motions
+
+### Do we want to turn on direct Stripe-based donations?
+
+This meeting discussed whether Libera Chat should be able to accept direct
+donations through Stripe in addition to Liberapay. This has the advantage
+of giving us more reliable income data, better support for one-time
+donations, and a more streamlined path to donation for new donors.
+This would require a minor privacy policy update
+in order to allow us to retain donor information as required by Swedish law,
+which would be retained by Stripe on our behalf.
+
+This proposition passed unanimously.
+
+### Election platform decision
+
+As participation in asynchronous elections is now required for continued
+membership in the Libera Chat organisation, this meeting was tasked with
+resolving how best to resolve an issue with the election system Libera Chat
+had used in previous years. The platform does not support disclosure of who
+voted in a particular election without also disclosing the exact votes cast,
+which was agreed to be undesirable. The meeting discussed either making a
+separate "roll-call" poll with ballot disclosure, or exploring an alternative
+voting platform that does not support ranked-choice ballots.
+
+The meeting ultimately agreed that adding a roll-call poll to the previous
+platform was the best way forward.
+
+### Privacy policy amendment
+
+This meeting proposed amending the privacy policy in order to contain explicit
+wording regarding what data may be retained by our channel management bot
+`litharge` in order to limit it scope.
+
+The meeting decided that the proposed amendment was premature
+as it doesn't cover data that may be retained by future channel management
+bots and that it should be revisited next meeting.
+
+## Other questions
+
+### Should we remove the NickServ vacation module?
+
+This meeting discussed removing the `NickServ` `VACATION` command
+which has had relatively little legitimate use. `VACATION` triples nick
+expiration times during the next logout. The meeting also considered
+whether the expiration of primary nicks should be extended due to this command
+being removed.
+
+The meeting agreed that `VACATION` should be removed, and that users who
+plan to be away from the network for more than a third of a year may contact
+staff to arrange an extended expiry time if necessary.
+The meeting agreed NOT to extend expiration times across the board, but did
+agree that unexpired accounts which have `VACATION` set should still keep
+the benefits of `VACATION` until their next login.