Re: primary email, balanced use of IRC

[John Sisson <jr...@gmail.com>]

sorry for the late reply..

David Crossley wrote:
> Cliff Schmidt wrote:
>   
>> Noel J. Bergman wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> The use of e-mail as the primary means for communication is part of ASF
>>> policy and philosophy, and we can certainly learn lessons from projects 
>>> that
>>> have gone against it.  IRC tends to breed a more closed, albeit arguably
>>> more integrated, community.
>>>
>>> That said, if IRC can be used as a learning tool to rapidly bring new 
>>> people
>>> up to speed, and if the information gathered from those sessions is
>>> preserved for others to follow up via web-site and e-mail, how do people
>>> perceive that?
>>>       
IRC can be great as a learning tool, but the downside I have seen is 
that often that information that is learned is not documented (e.g. in a 
Wiki or mailing list) for the benefit of others and the same questions 
may end up being asked by many people over time.
>> I've never done that on a project, but I think it could be a
>> reasonable thing for a project to try.  I believe the Synapse folks
>> have been doing regular IRC meetings from early on.  I'd be interested
>> in their perspective on the pros and cons, particularly as an
>> incubating project.
>>
>> As a XAP mentor, I know that the committers already understand that no
>> decisions will be made over IRC, that logs of each IRC will be
>> immediately made available to the entire community, and that they need
>> to be sensitive to any concerns from people wishing but unable to
>> participate.  But, are there other thoughts from the Synapse folks or
>> anyone else who has used regular IRC meetings?
>>     
>
> At Apache Forrest we strive to have all communication
> via the mailing lists.
>
> We have a deliberate IRC session once per month.
> It goes for 24 hours so that everyone can be involved.
> It is the second Friday of the month starting at a
> specific time. We use a different channel name, chosen
> by the operator. That prevents the channel from being
> constantly available and turning into either a club
> or a support forum.
> http://forrest.apache.org/forrest-friday.html
>
> We simultaneously use the dev@ mailing list.
> Some issues are better dealt with there.
>
> The committer who is operator does a regular commit of
> the logfile to our SVN. This keeps good track and allows
> us to refer to the log during the meeting. It could
> also enable people not on IRC to still be involved
> because they could reply to the svn commit email.
>   
Currently in Geronimo we don't post IRC logs to the dev list but have 
plans to do so in an automated fashion.

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=114912883000003&r=1&w=2
> We have said that we will also create a summary text
> of the days events. This latter task has not been
> carried out very well.
>
>   
I don't think it is realistic on busy IRC forums for one person to have 
the job of summarizing the IRC log for the day considering there may be 
a large number of different issues discussed by different people and the 
person summarizing may not understand what all the issues were.

Probably better if individuals summarized their discussions.

John
> Personally i reckon that the events have been very
> beneficial. I am still wary of using IRC more often
> than that.
>
> -David
>
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>   


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