I am part of a growing software project with at least 200 active developer in 10 locations. I would like to set up an on-line chat forum for developers because I think it would help to coordinate efforts. We have an email mailing list but I feel like some questions or announcements are too informal to send to everyone while mentioning it in a chat forum might be a useful community resource.
I have never participated in a software project that used an on-line chat forum so I would like to hear about peoples experiences. I am particularly interested in technical issues: Use of IRC vs. alternative platforms; how to manage access, eg. for developers only, allowing users to participate; the value of requiring certain announcements to be made on the chat forum eg who is resolving broken builds etc.
If I pitch the idea to the community I would like to have some good arguments why it would be a good idea and some prospective of its usefulness in other software projects.
The features you MOST want for such informal discussions are:
persistance (I have’t used IRC in >decade, does it persist chats that you missed?)
Searcheability
Classification (tagging) to help sort through the stuff.
Considering those 3, I’d strongly suggest some sort of discussion software (microblog, Wiki, forum) with RSS feed.