[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

I've tried to get some sort of clever browser thing going, but failed, as backup, some of you may remember the old #space chat room that was at


irc://chat.freenode.net/#space

I've found it a bit...umm....noisey at times. Sometimes great, sometimes a bit "WHY DON'T TEY USE TEH COLOR CAMERA5" if you get my drift.


So - I'll only announce it here - try irc://chat.freenode.net/#umsf tonight, I'll try and stay in there from about 1900, and us lot can have a chinwag about the MOI event as it happens

I use www.mirc.com to get 'in', but other irc clients are around - http://www.irchelp.org/ might help.

In the future - I want to have a java based IRC client within the UMSF domain so that we can just go to a page, put in a name, and be chatting - but for now, hopefully a couple of you will make it in there tonight.

Doug

[CosmicRocker]

I'm happy to see that we clarified all that, because we do try very hard to keep #space a friendly place for near real-time discussion of the latest and not-so-latest space exploration news. I think Dusty did an excellent job describing it. But IRC is quite a different animal from a forum, in that a channel cannot be neatly compartmentalized into topic areas. That means community chit-chat and off topic conversations must be tolerated to the extent that they do not materially interfere with the main purpose of the channel. We initially experimented with separate channels for MER and Cassini, but later decided that that overly fragmented the user base. The consensus opinion of the channel operators was for the merger that created #space. We still do maintain the side channel #space_politics as a place to direct the political and related conversations that tend to arise.

But Doug does make a good point when he says, "It's at a different place than UMSF in levels of presumed knowledge..." It would be nice to have a place where one could join a fireside chat with knowledgeable people. In #space, people have more or less learned to recognize who is likely to have useful information and who is likely to contibute to the background noise. UMSF does have a significant user base that might be mobilized into a chat mode. It will be an interesting experiment that I would like to see succeed.

In the meantime, some people have expressed their frustrations connecting to irc. This might be an appropriate place to describribe the problems they are having, and where other people can suggest solutions.