IRC

Wikipedia

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication and data transfers via private message.

IRC was created by Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen in late August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland. Oikarinen found inspiration in a chat system known as Bitnet Relay, which operated on the BITNET.

IRC gained prominence when it was used to report on the Soviet coup attempt of 1991 throughout a media blackout. It was previously used in a similar fashion by Kuwaitis during the Iraqi invasion. Relevant logs are available from ibiblio archive.

IRC client software is available for virtually every computer operating system.

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The OLPC Community uses a series of channels in the irc.freenode.net network.

Channels

Primary:

• #olpc — Contact point for all things olpc, and the core hardware development team's own channel. Picture a room where the knowledgeable core people are hard at work. It is a good place for authoritative answers, but people may be out, or too busy to respond, or don't want interruptions at the moment. #olpc-content is a good place to ask questions first.
• #sugar — Sugar development.
• #olpc-content — content related matters and general discussion.

Smaller: #olpc-xx (where xx is a language code), and #olpc-country.

• #olpc-es — Spanish language channel. Mostly OLPC Spanish America.
• #olpc-peru — Peru and OLPC Spanish America subjects (most likely to be in Spanish)
• #olpc-brasil — Brazil (note the spelling with the 's' - português)
• #olpc-ro — OLPC Romania
• #olpc-ko — OLPC Korea

other channels

Experimental:

• #olpc-wiki — geared towards issues or subjects relative to the wiki itself (Created around 20 June.)
• #olpc-l10n — has Localization as its focus (Created around 20 June.)

Inactive:

• #OLPC-Dictionary — related to the omegawiki.org children's dictionary for the olpc
• #tam_tam — TamTam (Inactive?)
• #olpc-talk — If #olpc is a room where people are working, then #olpc-talk is the hallway where conversation can be moved when it gets noisy or random, or folks just want focus on work. (Created 2007-06-04. Didn't draw much traffic. #olpc-content remains the main discussion venue. If/when that get's too noisy, #olpc-talk can be resurrected.)

How to use irc channels

1. If you don't know what IRC is, now is a good time to find out. It stands for Internet Relay Chat, and is basically... a chatroom. Some helpful resources are here, here, and especially this tutorial, which also includes basic commands.
2. Learn about IRC etiquette. Some good reads are here, here, and here.
3. Review the software client list. Pick one, download, install. If you haven't used IRC before, a good choice is Xchat, which works on both Linux and Windows; Linuxchix has a good tutorial.
4. connect to to one or more of the above mentioned channels, and join us! (To do this, choose irc.freenode.net as your server, and then /join a channel... if you're new to IRC, the #olpc-content channel is probably the place you want to go first).