@felixfontein what is exactly meant by deciding?
At least as I see it and already expressed in my previous comment, this is “default” and not mandatory if maintainers disagree.
I don’t think it should be a mandatory policy of sort and IRC or whatever else except the forum to get officially forbidden.
If the maintainers/communities of specific projects still want to use IRC, I think it’s up to them.
Maybe I misunderstood the intention, @gundalow ? If we are going to forbid IRC and make the forum mandatory at policy level within the community projects I don’t know how to handle this and whether it’s worth doing whatsoever:)