We're moving our Dev Chat to IRC

Ushahidi
Apr 27, 2014

Our community skype chat has seen some great improvement in activity over the past few weeks, with more folks seeking to collaborate and ask questions. With all the buzz and activity, we realised that we've more or less hit the limits on the number of people we can invite into the public chatroom, and there's nothing much we can do about that. Additionally, Skype public chats might not be around for much longer as Skype has stated here. In fact they have been discontinued and you can't create them any more. For this reason, we have finally made the decision to move our Dev Chat to IRC from Skype. Here are some more reasons why we're opting out of Skype and opting in for IRC :

IRC chat will be accessible to anyone and people won't have to be invited in.

IRC is used by more FOSS projects and so might be more familiar to newcomers.

It's just easier for people to drop in and out.

IRC makes it easy to engage with other open source initiatives like:

#php

#mysql

#kohana

#jquery

How do I get in?

Our IRC channel has actually been on chat.freenode.net for quite some time now at #ushahidi. Here are some IRC clients to help get you started: Mac

Colloquy - My personal favorite.

LimeChat

Quassel

Textual - $

Windows

Hexchat

Quassel

mIRC - $

Web Client

Web IRC

Change is hard, but is ultimately inevitable, especially in this case. An inaccessible community chat room is simply unacceptable. Yes, we're all used to Skype and it has worked pretty well for us in the past. However, skype presents some pretty huge barriers to our collaborative community, that we can't overcome. We will continue to maintain our active participation on IRC as we have on the dev chat.