I'm helping the group Focus the Nation on its project to organize climate change teach-ins around the country on Jan. 31, 2008. More on that later, but for now, I'm hoping you can help me help them. In particular, I'm trying to set up an IRC or chat room to complement FtN's conference calls. I've done the conference call + IRC thing once before (with, go figure, an organization connected to the Howard Dean campaign) and it worked fantastically: We could type thoughts without interrupting anyone, post url's, and even "raise our hand" when we wanted to speak. (I got to play moderator which was particularly fun...)
At any rate, I haven't touched IRC since then and don't know what software/etc to use. I need something simple and easy because our group is likely not full of techies. I've done a bit of poking around already (see below), but I'm hoping someone(s) here can expedite the process.
First, a quick overview of Focus the Nation. The basic idea is to have teach-ins about climate change at colleges/etc across the country on Jan. 31, 2008, to which local elected officials will be invited to get their questions about climate change answered in hopes of having smarter climate policy in 2008. More info on the project can be found here. A list of schools not yet signed up is here. Right now, I think the focus is on getting as many schools (and other organizations) on board as we can, so pass word on to anyone at those schools/etc you think would be interested. I consider this a very good project.
Thus far, the twice-monthly conference calls have about 15 people. Already, this is a bit unwieldy for phone-only. However, as the big date approaches, this could easily balloon to several hundred, if one person from each school signs on. If this happens, then we'll need more sophisticated approaches including splitting into multiple calls if anything's going to get done.
An interesting side note: The conference call + IRC/chatroom setup seems to be pushing the limits of human efficiency. I'm interested in learning more about this as part of my efforts to make the world a better place as much as I can. I wonder if others here share this interest.
OK, here's what I've got so far:
- IRC on Wikipedia. This provides a useful little info on IRC clients.
- A dedicated IRC Help website which is way too wordy for my purposes. (It's "very short beginners' intro" is 3 screenfulls of text- eek! It did provide some IRC client recommendations: mIRC for Windows, these for Mac, and IrcII for Unix. Are these good recommendations? mIRC seems more complicated than what I'd hope for, but it is free.
- A list of chat rooms from Yahoo search. The links didn't seem all that great.
- Chatzilla, IRC for Mozilla. See also this. It looks nice. Anyone used this before?
- Technology Friday: What's on Your Hard Drive? by DavidNYC on this here site. The long comment thread has lots of links, but it all seems, like, sooo 2005.
- Trillian seems a popular product. Is this the way to go? Is the full version worth $25? According to this, the full version is necessary for Trillian to integrate with Google Chat.
- DailyKos IRC Channel on dkosopedia. Is there anything DailyKos doesn't have? That uses EFnet. I logged on but it didn't seem all that great. Am I missing something?
OK, so:
My first choice would probably be something web-based so no one has to download anything. But not a blog/forum/etc, unless we can make a private one and have other IRC features like direct private messaging.
If something downloaded is the best option, I would need something for Windows, Mac, & maybe Linux, although my guess is we don't have any Linux users and that if we do, they're tech-savvy enough to figure it out themselves. Free is good. Easy is more important than bells & whistles. We just need something that works, with minimal hassle.
What do yinz recommend?