Quite simply, Clan 9 From Outer Space is a group of friends in the same research group at Stanford who like to play Quake together. That's "together" in the sense of "at the same time"... not necessarily implying any tendency toward cooperation or an aversion to fragging each other into little tiny gory pieces.
One area in which we do cooperate is in maintaining a local Quake server configured the way we like it, both for intraclan poundings and for showing our special Clan 9 hospitality to any visitors from elsewhere. The server configuration is described on the Mothership page; send us mail about it if something goes wrong, or if you have other comments. We're connect to the net with a pretty fat pipe, and we've increased sys_ticrate a little to reduce the amount of data the clients have to field, so the Mothership has the potential to serve up a nice, smooth game. Some people used to still be rather boorish while using our server, so we put together something for them to read... the clientele is generally better-behaved these days, but we'll leave that rant in place for posterity's sake. Also, you might want to read our little treatise if you just don't understand why you're not experiencing a LAN-like game on the Mothership.