This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.
This is a series of challenges intended to introduce new Mozilla community members—including volunteers and paid staff—to life at Mozilla.
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it's one of the oldest ways to talk to others on the Internet. It's also the primary way that people hang out and help each other in the Mozilla community.
Use the IRC Getting Started Guide to pick an IRC client and choose a nickname for yourself. When you're ready, join the newbies channel by typing /join #newbies. You can use this channel to ask for assistance from your peers and help them out, too.
Go ahead and say hello on this channel and see if anyone responds. If no one does, it's not because they don't like you–it's simply because they're all busy and none of them are currently looking at the chat channel.
If you can, find a peer and practice chatting with them a bit to become more comfortable with IRC and its commands. Once you're used to it, it can be an invaluable tool and a fun place to hang out.
I hang out in #foundation and #learning. Every once in a while I check into the badges channel. I like IRC a lot, especially when the conversation gets a lot of voices. There's a lot of fun people that hang out in these rooms, come join us!
I am on two IRC channels mostly- #hackasaurus and #foundation. But I kind of troll the #fistbump channel and have a bit of IRC envy about how they use IRC as a real chatting platform. I wish that the foundation channels were more chatty- since this is the only thing that I have as a "watercooler"
It'd also be helpful to list recommended Mozilla chat rooms for once you get the hang of IRC. #foundation, for example.
Thanks Michelle! That's a good idea, though one of my concerns right now is how project/area-specific to make these challenges. Right now they're made to be as broad as possible, appealing to people involved in any aspect of the Mozilla ecosystem–Foundation, Firefox, Thunderbird, Labs, HR, and so on.
That broadness makes it very hard to give specific advice, since different areas of Mozilla are so different. But at the same time, specific advice for someone's area would be enormously helpful!
Let me noodle on this a bit.
