This is a good initiative - many thanks for this. However, why Freenode? I would personally rather go for a network like Furion. They have some very fast local servers and house South African geek channels such as #clug
I am particularly interested in the "local servers" part as I use local-only ADSL most of the time. I hand out on Furion all of the time but am not on Freenode that often because of this.