I seem to recall that someone had put a petition into Freenode to fix this, but I don't know what came of that.
I'll plan on hanging out on #freenode and asking for help later on today. This is silly :-/.
Urk. It's even worse than I thought.
To fix this, we need to submit a group registration: http://freenode.net/group_registration.shtml
But they have a backlog...of months, and not single digit months. The only hope for is that the request on behalf of Wine that did go in a while ago may be getting near the top (I submitted a new one today as well).
So I've sent email off to Mike and Andi begging them to help us out; I've specifically asked them to make Alexandre the contact.
If anyone sees either of them in a bar, please trap them and make them sign on and fix this.
Cheers,
Jeremy