It may be a good idea to claim a monthly "maintenance window", that may or may not be used. At such moments we may expect (parts of) openacs.org, to be down for a while.
Can openacs.org send notifications regarding the use, prolonging, changing of a "maintenance window" by e-mail? IRC will work for some, only.
BTW: "Maintenance" notification (and strategies for emergency handling like harddisk failure, ddos) are useful to document for openacs sites in general.