I never met Rob in person, but his indefatigable work in keeping freenode running supported hundreds of conversations I have had with people around the world, many becoming friends, colleagues or collaborators, and I counted him as a friend. I was hired at Technorati through a conversation on freenode, and the #microformats, #technorati, #wordpress, #wikinews and of course #joiito channels are a key part of my online life.
When setting up transient channels for conference backchannels, Rob was always helpful and courteous. I am sad to hear of his death, and the best memorial would be to keep freenode and the PDPC going as he did so well.
Lilo's accounts are still logged in at freenode, and every so often jibot reminds us:
lilo is the executive director of Peer-Directed Projects Center in Houston, Texas & he's another boring cooperativist propertarian Peircean pragmatist anarchist & he runs freenode (http://freenode.net/) & certainly hasn't been getting more sleep lately & is working on freenode-registry in Ruby & blogs on http://spinhome.org/ & http://bloggage.org/ & also uses the nick 'somegeek' & passed away Sep 16th, 2006 (RIP)
Update: Rob spent his days in a constant battle to keep freenode as a place for civil discourse, fighting off trolls, spammers and other net parasites. He did this with grace and good humour, imposing as few rules as possible, and generally inspiring people to behave well by trusting them to. Sadly, the self-described deletionists who infest Wikipedia (summed up well as people who remove what they find unsuitable, while giving little "awards" to each other for removing things) have decided to delete Lilo again. Please help explain to them why this is mistaken, pettifogging, and in appalling taste.
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