Together with a select few, I am working on an (almost) all new IRC solution. We will be using Undernet's IRCu with quite some modifications and a services package written from scratch. If it goes our way, "chat community" will get an entirely new meaning when our software is used.
Update notice: this project has long been superseded by a more ambitious project that has been on hold for a long time. Nothing to see here, folks.
There are many things we've planned but I'm not going to promise too much, so you'll just have to wait for the first preview version.
The current version of the services is implemented in Ruby and may be tweaked using some high-performance language later.
The following is a list of the most important changes made to the ircd: