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For the most part, the Foundation's just a project to support existing projects and developers who use the IRC protocol. This can mean providing financial support, access to more business-oriented resources like designers/legal/etc, as well as simply improving the quality of protocol documentation out there (the part I'm handling). In terms of strict protocol improvements, the IRCv3 WG is the real place where that's going on, the most authoritative thing in terms of introducing new stuff across the IRC infrastructure these days: https://ircv3.net/ But, for new developers looking to get into IRC today, the resources aren't as available as they could be. Sure, there's a bunch of code to look at, libraries you can use to get started that seem to work fine. But when you wanna start digging into the wire protocol, how particular commands or functions work, how to actually approach writing a client/server from scratch, all you have are either the RFCs, some newer resources like the ircdocs/IRCv3, or stuff spread across 20+ year-old textfiles and pages all across the net. My intention for the documentation side of the Foundation is to build up information on how to use/parse commands and numerics, how widely they're used (in terms of software support), and how to really dig into and approach development with the protocol – since that feels like the more valuable information to be out there right now for new devs. It'll be linked to and public sometime soon, it's just that building up a swathe of documentation large enough to show we're serious about it takes some time (if you want those docs to be decent-quality, at least). For what it's worth, I'm both the primary writer/maintainer of the Foundation's developer docs work, and the maintainer of the more community effort https://ircdocs.horse/ , so hopefully I'm on the right track with supporting devs in the protocol documentation sense. If there's any questions or suggestions for directions to take on this (stuff that you, as a dev, would find useful for writing IRC software), please let me know! Even if it's not there for initial launch there's a fair backlog of stuff I'm looking to make up with this project. |