So, give IRC a try and help liberate people

There has been growth on IRC since last year… we have seen the number of people participating in #eclipse increase to about ~150 and about ~35 in #eclipse-dev (I’d say about ~30% growth). We have also seen popular Eclipse projects like Equinox (#equinox-dev) and Modeling (#eclipse-modeling) make their debut. I’d love to see other projects follow suite, like those CDT guys as there are frequent CDT questions in #eclipse

In the end, this is just another avenue to reach the users of your technology and help support them. It also tends to have a more personal feel than say newsgroups or mailing lists. IRC allows you to build a kind of camaraderie not found in other communication avenues. This is all part of something I jokingly call zx’s law. zx’s law states that the success of an open-source project is highly tied to the number of people that idle in its IRC channels. Just look at #ubuntu and its 1000+ users.

On a side note, someone crazy thought it would be funny to write an Ajax-based IRC client called Mibbit. For those behind crazy firewalls, Mibbit may be a good option as it provides a clean IRC user interface.

In the end, we’re one step closer to have funny IRC quotes published to bash.org

How about that, don’t think corporations can block port 80.

Anyway, those Ubuntu guys are pretty smart and understand how to build online open-source communities with their upcoming Ubuntu Open Week. Online workshops are a cool idea, especially when they are done in IRC. Looking at Ubuntu’s support network on IRC is amazing… ~1200 users at anytime helping each other out. It’s amazing feeling of jumping on IRC and asking a question and getting an instant response…

Ian, what do you think?

Come on guys, IRC isn’t like Gopher which went out of style in the 90′s… give it a try.

Ok, I’ve finally done it… I’m putting together a bugday for Eclipse! The first bug day will be July 27 2007. Don’t know what a bugday is? Please check out the FAQ.

Note, this will be a small experiment first to see how things go. If we get a lot of contributors from the community stepping up to participate in bugday, we’ll continue having them and expand the number of committers that participate!

If you’re a community member and ever wanted to have code included in an Eclipse release, well now is your chance Check out the FAQ to learn how to participate. It will be as simple as picking certain bugs (these are keyworded as ‘bugday’ ) chosen by the projects participating in the first bugday. Don’t worry, these bugs are geared for first time contributors. For example, ECF has a bug that wants to add a default IRC server. WTP has a bug to reorganize the location of some wizards. If you’re interested in any of these bugs, please let the bug authors know in the bug and update the wiki with your intentions.

Other than that, I hope some people choose to participate as the Eclipse Foundation has offered some swag to the first participants of bugday. Feel free to ask me any questions via email or on this blog via a comment.

Also, thanks to everyone on IRC that has helped put this together (Nitin, Remy, Paul, Kim), couldn’t do it without you guys.

For those who don’t “get IRC,” well, it’s the way it works in open-source. Open-source users these days expect to find help on IRC from open-source projects. Having a strong presence on IRC tends to be equated to having strong community outreach (when is the last time someone said something bad about Gentoo‘s community?) I would love to see more CDT and PDT people on IRC as there are a lot of questions that go unanswered in this area. It’s also a good opportunity to get to know your fellow committers.

In the end, I mean, even Wayne managed to get things working, and he doesn’t get IRC at all

Call me an old school open-source developer, but I like my IRC and IRC bots (especially when they are Eclipse-based)