The issue I've always had with IRC is that if you are not a gear-head, you really have never used it. The logs are *mostly* either not indexed at Google, or not even kept at all, so you cannot link to a discussion of what this one or that one said, and you cannot read those discussions.
Yes I'm aware that *some* chats are being logged.
If the community wants to *reach out* to all the non technologists, IRC is not the way to reach.
-----Original Message----- From: Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net To: wikimedia-sf wikimedia-sf@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Jul 30, 2013 6:27 am Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-SF] Berkeley Wikipedians
On 7/29/13 8:12 PM, Jeremy Baron wrote:
I think IRC's not too scary if there's an appointed meeting time with people that are guaranteed to be friendly and helpful and there's only one channel to have to pay attention to. It's easy to make a webchat link with the fields all pre-filled (e.g. with the channel name. or even IRC nick)
IRC is not scary for you, but it is a significant barrier to anyone who doesn't already know it. So, no, I personally will not be organizing any "meetings" on IRC. YMMV.
kc