Re: Discussions on irc.gnome.org

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 09:46:51AM -0500, Eric Baudais wrote:
> There are not set times for discussions on IRC in #docs.  There are a
> lot of people from Europe and America who frequent the #docs channel. 
> This means that most discussions happen around the mornings to afternoon
> (8:00am to 12:00pm CST -0600 GMT).  Since there are people in America
> the other half of the discussions happen around the evening (7:00pm to
> 11:00pm CST -0600 GMT).  The best way to monitor IRC is to open an IRC
> client and leave it open checking it every so often.  You can even start
> a discussion.  Sometimes people will chime in and sometimes they won't. 
> It is very ad hoc, but some of the most valuable discussions happen on
> IRC.  I would encourage you to join the #docs channel and see what it is
> like.

I would like to ask (as I've done in the past) that if anything of
substance comes up in IRC discussions that affect the general group,
some kind of summary or call for discussion is sent to this list.

I know Eric does this from time to time and others have ocassionaly,
too, but I just want ot raise it in peoples' consciousness again.

I, for one, live in a timezone (UTC+10) that has few convenient overlaps
with anybody in Europe or North America. I cannot easily monitor IRC
during the day while I am at work becaues I am doing .. well ... work. I
can, however, read the mailing list in idle moments and off-hours and
that is not dependent on other people being awake. I am not the only
person in this situation, but just one example.

I appreciate how IRC works. I'm a big fan of it. However, it is a very
impermanent form of communication and we need to use the list for more
substantive issues.

There's not really a problem yet (that I've noticed), but I wanted to
play devil's advocate to the above post a little.

Malcolm