> Justin, Sander, and I just chatted on IRC. This reminds me. Many of us recognize the benefits of instant messaging, via whatever method. However, when I first started contributing to James, one of the things that came out from one longer time Community member was a great deal of ... "displeasure" ... over the fact that a some of us might communicating via any mechanism other than the mailing list.
On the other hand, I have repeatedly noticed that when instant messaging is available, it has multiple benefits: - people spent more time working - people felt that they had more immediacy to their colleagues - people felt that they were getting better feedback - people felt more collaborative - people built friendships - misunderstandings were more likely to be corrected before significant ire was displayed I could go on. These benefits seem valuable to me, especially to bring a geographically dis-joint community closer, but I also acknowledge the value of open and archived discussions, so that everyone may participate. Are there any policies regarding IRC use, and is there an infrastructure participation in setting on an IRC channel for a project, or do we just go do something? Several ASF projects use IRC, including tomcat, mod_perl, Struts, Jelly, and others. It appears that at least those hosted by Werken maintain IRC archives to supplement the mail archives (I suspect that all do). Finally, is IRC the right tool, compared (for example) to a Jabber server? Similar to Andrew's establishment of the Wiki, does it make sense to install jabberd (http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/) for ASF projects (in the long run, I'm thinking that James ought to support the Jabber protocol). --- Noel
