IRC as A Tool for Community

Clay and Jo, I noted your recent posts [1,2] on IRC and community and 
thought you might be interested in these two IRC tools. At the W3C we've 
been using IRC in the way described by Clay [2] for a few years and many of 
us tend to rely upon two interesting bots. First, chump is able to create a 
blog from IRC when people use particular conventions in the discussion.
  http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/
Second, the Zakim telecon-bridge bot (named after the new big-dig bridge in 
Boston) is able to help moderate the discussion keeping track of a timer 
for folks "2-minutes" report, agenda items, the speaker queue, etc. 
Furthermore, given it's interface to the bridge, it knows who's on the 
call, and can mute, un-mute, call folks, etc. Pretty nifty!
  http://www.w3.org/2001/12/zakim-irc-bot

(Finally, and as an aside, in [3] I argue that the size of a community is 
one of the dominant hindrances to progress, in concurrence with Clay's "The 
value is inverse to the size of the group.")

[1]http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/07/02/rediscovering_irc_and_the_alchemy_of_social_software.html
[2]http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html 
  "But since conference calls are so lousy on their own, I'm going to bring
  up a chat window at the same time." And then, in the first meeting, I
  think it was Pete Kaminski said "Well, I've also opened up a wiki, and
  here's the URL." And he posted it in the chat window. And people can start
  annotating things. People can start adding bookmarks; here are the lists.
[3]http://goatee.net/2003/07#_02we-a | Design By Committee

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2003 13:29:22 UTC