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!
Articles | Administrator | 
Thursday, January 10, 2002 12:00 pm
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