Internet relay chat (IRC) is a familiar communication tool in FOSS development and user communities. It can be vibrant, fast-paced, friendly, exceedingly geeky, and ideal for getting a quick response to a hard question you just haven't been able to sort. If you have not tried it previously then now is as good a time as any.

You could start by exploring the IRC channels, or chat rooms, that support Koha or Evergreen development, or for the more daring amongst you, try the code4lib IRC channel.

IRC is real time, or synchronous, communication. So the people chatting on an IRC channel are doing it right now before your eyes.  This puts their collective expertise and experience immediately at your finger tips. But of course it also limits you to just those who are in the room at any one time. The more people in the room, the more likely it is that there will be someone there who has dealt with precisely your question before. Be sure that your interventions are brief, to the point, and courteous. And in most cases you will get a helpful response.

Some people keep their IRC client open on various channels all day long (even all night). Just because you see the nick of someone you know listed as being in the channel, don't assume that they are necessarily monitoring the chat room at that moment. To constantly monitor all the IRC channels you might like to be in would take up every moment of the day. Even just staying up with the incredibly chatty code4lib channel can be daunting.

And that brings up logging. Most IRC clients (I use Pidgin - which has versions available for Windows and Linux)  support some form of local logging of the channels you are in. So you might spot my nick - I usually show up as randym - in a channel, but I'm off doing something else at the moment, maybe reading or answering email, or writing a blog entry. Later I will review my local log of the activity in the channel to see if something especially interesting showed up. And if someone pings me, Pidgin will catch my attention.

Using IRC this way changes it from a synchronous communications format to a static information page. These pages won't be treasured for their brilliant prose, but they could reveal the most pressing problems confronting users of the software. Which could make them very useful indeed.  Both of the projects above make their IRC logs publicly available and searchable: Koha IRC logs; Evergreen IRC logs (a recent addition).

The other great advantage of logs for IRC channels is that they make the discussions available to those who may be many time zones distant, or who may have intermittent Internet connections.

IRC isn't for everyone. Me, I love a good email list, especially one that is publicly archived and I am prone to enthusing about such lists.  Some of the FOSS projects I've been involved with simply couldn't work in a coordinated way without email lists, either because there were too few people involved to make an IRC channel sensible (is there anything as sad as being the only person in an IRC chat room?), or because time zones simply made it impractical. On the other hand, you might agree with a friend of mine who once complained that, Email is so 20th century!

Maybe. In any case, there is plenty of room for multiple channels of communication serving different ends in FOSS development and user communities. And IRC has advantages that make it well worth learning how to use well.

Comments: If you can login to the eIFL.net website, then you can add comments to this blog post directly. If not, just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net and be sure to let me know whether you wish your comment to published and attributed (I'm also happy to receive comments that you don't wish to have published).