On 2016-09-24 12:52, Gleim, Urs wrote:

just a remark: we have some proxy restrictions in the company which
result in the fact that IRC is not really practically usable. So our
main communication channel would be the mailing list I am afraid.

This is a problem for many companies, actually, but I hope we can still encourage people to participate in IRC, mainly because there are so many established FOSS projects and contributors actively using IRC. It's old-school, but it has been working very well for several decades now. Using the newer services (Slack, Google Groups etc) may seem to achieve similar functionality but they don't achieve the same direct connection to other communities.

Codethink's default recommendation to get IRC in the situation you have at Siemens would be to setup a web-based service. We've had success with Shout [1] and its fork The Lounge [2]. Basically these allow people to participate in IRC directly from a web-browser. Normally people run the server on a tiny/cheap cloud machine, eg AWS. Both relatively easy to setup, either by members directly, or maybe by Linux Foundation?

Alternatively we'd be happy to create accounts on our existing Shout instance [3] if that's of interest.

br
Paul

[1] https://github.com/erming/shout
[2] https://thelounge.github.io
[3] https://chat.codethink.co.uk