IRC

Much OSGeo related communication happens in IRC (Internet Relay Chat), an instant messaging protocol. Lots of general information on IRC is available in Wikipedia.

Clients
IRC requires IRC client software. There are a wide variety of clients available. The ChatZilla client is available for Firefox users on all platforms.

IRC uses a TCP/IP port which is often blocked in environments with strictly managed internet access. In these environments it is still possible to use http based clients such as:


 * http://irc.telascience.org/
 * http://www.mibbit.com/

Channels
The primary OSGeo channel is #osgeo on the irc.freenode.net network. Generally speaking you would connect to irc.freenode.net and then issue the "/join #osgeo" command or possibly follow the irc://irc.freenode.net/osgeo URL.

Other channels of interest:

Projects

 * #fdo - Feature Data Objects
 * #featureserver - FeatureServer
 * #foss4g2008 - FOSS4G 2008 conference organization
 * #gdal - GDAL/OGR project (as well as FWTools, PROJ.4)
 * #geonetwork - Geonetwork Open Source
 * #geotools - GeoTools (also to some extent GeoServer, uDig)
 * #grass - GRASS GIS
 * #mapbender - Mapbender
 * #mapguide - MapGuide Open Source (and Enterprise)
 * #mapserver - MapServer and some MapServer based frameworks
 * #metacrs - MetaCRS
 * #openlayers - OpenLayers
 * #ossimplanet - OSSIM project
 * #postgis - PostGIS
 * #proj - PROJ.4
 * #qgis - Quantum GIS

Local Chapters

 * #osgeo-es - Capítulo Local de la comunidad hispano-hablante
 * #osgeo-fr - Francophone language OSGeo Chapter
 * #gfoss - Italian language OSGeo Chapter
 * #osgeo-phl - Philadelphia area OSGeo Chapter

Other

 * #geojson
 * #kml
 * #moss4g

Etiquiette

 * Don't ask to ask, just go ahead and ask your question.
 * Don't paste large chunks of text into IRC channels. If you want to present a code or configuration file snippet to others to look at use a "pasting service" like http://rafb.net/paste to host the snippet, and then paste the url to it into the IRC channel.
 * If you want the attention of a particular person, include their nick in the message and they will generally be alerted (flashed, bell rung, etc).
 * Give folks a while to respond. They are usually multi-tasking and might not look at IRC for a while.
 * If an active conversation is going on, wait for a lull to raise a different topic (a minute of inactivity for instance)

Logs
Many popular OSGeo related channels are logged. The #osgeo channel logs are at:

http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo

Other logs may also be found under:

http://logs.qgis.org/

Some channels (ie. #mapserver and #osgeo) are also logged on IRSeek (http://www.irseek.com), an IRC search engine.