How to foster community at your company–for free

Like many organizations, you’ve probably deployed a corporate intranet site to post a company directory, support commonly used forms, provide a company calendar, and offer other information. While such resources are valuable, they don’t foster a sense of community. With many organizations now supporting teams in geographically dispersed areas, community can be hard to come by.

Frequent meetings help, but nobody wants to waste time in a meeting just to promote teamwork. Instant-messaging software is OK for casual conversations, but not every instant-messaging client supports multi-person chatting, and those that do make it a bit cumbersome.

There is a perfectly good tool for fostering an immediate sense of community within your organization, and it’s even free. But it suffers from two problems, one more critical than the other. The tool is Internet Relay Chat (IRC), an Internet-based service similar to those that provide chat rooms in AOL and other fee-based proprietary services. IRC lets users exchange text messages in a common window, so that everyone can see what everyone else types.

If you’re familiar with IRC at all, you probably just reacted in a way that evidences one of its problems. Chat rooms are often seen as the domain of sex-starved lowlifes, swappers of copyrighted files, crackers, and other shady characters. It’s true you’ll find plenty of those on IRC channels (a channel is equivalent to a chat room), but you can also find channels devoted to other common interests, such as a hobby or a locality.

Anyone can set up a channel on one of the major IRC networks. There are ways to make channels secure, and limit membership to only certain individuals (i.e., only your employees). Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that the security measures you take will be foolproof. A determined hacker might well be able to break into your channel. That brings me to IRC’s second main flaw: security.

Luckily, the IRC server code, or IRC daemon, is available for free. You simply need a Unix or Linux host computer to run it on. If you want to connect your IRC server to one of the major IRC networks, be sure to get a flavor of the daemon designed with the right network. Most organizations, however, will want to keep their IRC server off the wider world of IRC and make it available only to folks within the confines of a firewall or VPN. Users can then run client software like mIRC or PIRCH for text chat in real time. Alternatively, you can link to a Java-based IRC interface like alphaWorks on your intranet site.

If you want to learn more about IRC, I strongly recommend “The Book of IRC” by Alex Charalabidis. It’s the best bible available for IRC.

If you decide to host an IRC server or channel, your next step will probably be to automate some channel functions using a software agent, or bot, in IRC parlance. The most popular and powerful scripting language for IRC is called Eggdrop. I haven’t found any printed reference materials on eggdrop, but egghelp.org is the next best thing. Some smart publisher ought to sign up its creator, slennox, to write his or her own reference book.

Anybody have a really good Eggdrop bot for managing a channel? Send me the code!

Why the wireless world’s not ready for you

New York and Boston are close enough that there’s little difference in time between an airplane flight and a train ride door-to-door to downtown Manhattan. I prefer Amtrak–it’s less disruptive, with no excruciating cab ride from LaGuardia and less walking overall.

While I spent the first hour-and-a-half of my latest train ride back to Boston writing a story about the trade show I had just attended, I let my computer do most of the heavy lifting for this column. I popped an Orinoco Silver wireless network adapter into my Sony PictureBook notebook and launched a clever application called Network Stumbler.

Running in a background window, Network Stumbler scans the airwaves for 802.11b wireless activity. If there’s an access point or peer adapter within range, it lists it, along with some vital information, such as its Service Set Identifier (SSID)–an identifier that designates a logical network–and whether it uses encryption. If you have a global positioning system device attached to the PC, Network Stumbler even lists discovered devices’ longitude and latitude, which you can then pinpoint on a map using mapping software.

Network Stumbler’s results were revealing. I found 79 wireless devices: 76 were access points, and 3 were clients. Of these, only 19 access points had WEP security enabled. That means that, should I have had the time and interest, I could easily have piggybacked onto the others’ network connections to get Internet access–in effect, stealing bandwidth. If their internal networks were poorly secured, I could have read and possibly even uploaded files onto their internal clients and servers.

Want to know which access points aren’t secured? The only ones I can identify are MIT and the MIT Media Lab (and someone who chose Apt. 10A as his SSID). Kudos to Art Technology Group, Andor Capital Management, and CNET Networks for enabling WEP.

And which vendors have the largest share of the wireless networking market? Cisco and Agere, the Lucent spinoff that markets the WaveLAN and Orinoco brands, lead the list with 25 access points apiece. Other players included Linksys (11), Cabletron spinoff Enterasys (4), Addtron (3), D-Link (2), and Compaq (2).

I was surprised at how few wireless access points I found on my train ride. Between Pennsylvania Station in New York and South Station in Boston, Network Stumbler turned up only 43 devices. The other 33 were all in and around Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., home of MIT and a hotbed of technology development. Of course, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor passes through marshes and across rivers as well as through a few cities, so maybe the low count isn’t that surprising. Or maybe it indicates that, so far, wireless networking hasn’t taken off in proportion to the amount of press it’s getting.

This was certainly an unscientific survey, but it highlights just how easy it is to access networks if they leave a wireless hole open. If you’re exploring wireless at work, or even at home–as many, myself included, are–use WEP if you want to keep your traffic private and your passwords hidden.