content/news/2016-12-31-2016-is-finally-dead.md

   1 ---
   2 title: Happy New Year!
   3 date: 2016-12-31 12:34:56Z
   4 author: christel
   5 slug: 2016-is-finally-dead
   6 ---
   7
   8 Another year comes to an end: 2016, a year many will be glad to see the back
   9 of. For many the year has been dominated by uncertainty, by fear, and by
  10 sadness—a year dominated, in no small part, by the political shift on both
  11 sides of the Atlantic.
  12
  13 And a year dominated by death. We have looked on in surprise as icon after icon
  14 has passed away throughout the course of the year. We have looked on in sadness
  15 as masses of people have succumbed to terror and war. We have looked on as
  16 people try to flee, in search of a better life, often not succeeding. And as a
  17 project based in the UK we look on as the government tries to do its best to
  18 put an end to our digital rights, to our privacy.
  19
  20 Some years ago, freenode experienced a sudden influx of Arabic-speaking users.
  21 They came out of nowhere and there were lots of them. Their arrival caused some
  22 distress to the existing communities on the network at the time; freenode
  23 predominantly caters to free and open source software developers and users and
  24 we were all somewhat perplexed when our network was overrun by teenagers
  25 wanting to chat about girls and football. They all seemed to be connecting from
  26 Syria.
  27
  28 When Aleppo comes up in the news, many of us find ourselves thinking about those
  29 kids and what happened to them. One of our volunteers invested a fair amount of
  30 time trying to figure out where they ended up. When discussing it recently, he
  31 shared his experience:
  32
  33 > “After a few weeks of surreal crazy chaos we worked out that they were using a
  34 > Java IRC client - and internet café PCs - to connect to our system.  They
  35 > didn't know what it was for or why it existed but they'd found real-time
  36 > online communication for the first time and were enjoying the shit out of it.
  37
  38 > I first used IRC in the 90s when an IRC client was given to me by a friend not
  39 > very long after it was the medium for some of the first ever real-time citizen
  40 > journalism during the 1991 Gulf War. In much the same way that someone threw
  41 > some software at me in a computing lab in Oxford and showed me how to use it
  42 > to chat, these kids were sharing and collaborating in the streets and using
  43 > new tools to talk to the guy a computer or a block or a neighbourhood over
  44 > with equal ease.
  45
  46 > While we tried to shepherd a group of unruly teenagers into a corner where
  47 > they would cause less trouble for everyone else, I got to know a couple of the
  48 > better English-speakers quite well; they seemed mostly to be basically decent
  49 > kids growing up much too quickly and experiencing my corner of the internet
  50 > for the first time. They were mostly in Aleppo.
  51
  52 > As the Arab Spring progressed they grew in number and it was genuinely cool
  53 > watching them discover and explore. But as spring turned to summer and then
  54 > autumn, they gradually dropped in number and started to vanish. After a while
  55 > I realised they'd mostly gone, and I tried to track some of the stragglers
  56 > down to find out what had happened to the ringleader or any of the kids I'd
  57 > gotten to know.
  58
  59 > The ringleader had been killed in shellfire, was the answer. I found his blog.
  60 > It had been silent for a couple of months. Eventually it fell off the internet
  61 > when the account was suspended.
  62
  63 > When a year later they all seemed to have gone I made more of an effort to do
  64 > some digital anthropology and figure out just what had happened to them in
  65 > more depth. I talked to a Lebanese peer who ran some adult Arabic language
  66 > discussion spaces and he speculated that by that point hey had all died or
  67 > fled and crossed the border into other countries.”
  68
  69 As we reflect on the sobering condition of the world around us, it would be
  70 easy to forget about the positives.
  71
  72 We have the privilege of seeing thousands of people work on thousands of
  73 projects they love, and it's humbling and exciting to be allowed to play a small
  74 part in each of them. We're extremely grateful for that: we love learning about
  75 your projects; we love learning about the different ways in which people
  76 communicate and collaborate; we love learning about what you produce and why.
  77
  78 We have exceptionally generous sponsors who not only provide us with hardware
  79 and bandwidth but also with their continued time and expertise when required.
  80
  81 Thanks to one such sponsor we have also secured the majority of the requisite
  82 funding to put on a two-day live conference which will take place in the UK in
  83 August 2017. Further details and a formal announcement will follow early in the
  84 New Year. We are incredibly excited and hope that you will join us; we'd love
  85 for your project to exhibit or perhaps you could give a talk? Keep an eye out
  86 for our announcement!
  87
  88 With that, we would like to thank you all for using freenode and wish you the
  89 very best for 2017!