Free Spirits

Free Spirits (FS) is an organization formed to promote open communication among boylovers. It grew out of a need to ensure the continued existence of BoyChat, but has since sponsored various other resources. It is named after Kasper's Free Spirits web site, which was one of the first Web pages on the Internet created to celebrate boylove, and the original home of BoyChat.

Free Spirits does not take any stance on boylove issues nor does it advocate any position or ideology, but simply exists to provide the infrastructure and support to ensure that its resources are able to be run securely and continuously. The Free Spirits Committee (FSC) plans and carries out all FS initiatives.

Free Spirits Committee

The Free Spirits Committee (or FSC) is the group responsible for providing and managing a host for all resources under the Free Spirits umbrella. FSC members determine the overarching policies by which resources must abide. These policies are designed to help ensure the security, legality and usefulness of Free Spirits resources. FSC members are generally drawn from contributors to, and administrators of, Free Spirits resources. There is no limit to the number of members who may be on the committee at any time.

History

The FSC arose out of the BoyChat Steering Committee founded by Jimf3 and the name "Free Spirits Committee" was in use by late 1997. In its early years, the FSC struggled to bring into operation its own web server to give Free Spirits more independence from commercial ISP's and the webmaster of BoyChat was automatically the chairman of the committee.

As Free Spirits took on more projects, many of them hosted under FPC, it eventually became clear that one committee could no longer oversee all its projects and still concentrate on maintaining the most important objective, which was connectivity for those projects.

By December of 1999, the FSC began to invest in quasi-independent groups and individuals to maintain and set policy for each resource it hosts. After its emergence from the Great Outage in 2001, the FSC has maintained a policy that allows each resource to govern itself based on a set of rules they must abide by.

The primary activities of the FSC today include registering domains, ensuring continued hosting of FS sites, determining general site policy, communicating with outside bodies, providing technical support for the various resources as well as the operation and maintenance of Free Spirits servers.

Current Members

Membership of the FSC is subject to change. Current members as of 23 August 2009 are:

• Fleetwood
• Hínandil
• Maintenance Elf
• Sentinel
• 1 Anonymous member

The FSC can be contacted by email at fsc|freespirits|org.

Current Free Spirits resources

• BoyChat
• BoyLinks, here
• BoyWiki
• BoyWrite, here
• El Castillo Azul, here
• La Garçonnière, here
• Jongensforum, here
• Jungsforum, here
• LifeLine

Former Free Spirits resources

Since its founding, Free Spirits has implemented many different projects as they were called for by the community. Some, like Christian Boylove Forum, flourished and eventually left for their own hosting arrangements and others, like Libertad, failed soon after opening.

• Christian Boylove Forum, now here
• Close Encounters
• Freedom Board (Archives for 2002-2007 )
• Free Paed Cooperative (Archives for 1997-2007)

Former hosted sites

• GirlChat

External links

• Free Spirits homepage