Edit: Some updates from suggestions from Mitchell

David said that they had an IRC channel; just for work. He said a lot of other things too, but the main reason he said that he loved his new job was that there was an IRC channel; just for work.

David’s a bloke I used to see maybe once or twice every six months or so. And whenever I used to see him it was, as it always has been, excellent. And he’d always go on about this IRC channel they had; just for work.

Now David’s a smart bloke who knows a surprising amount about stuff like making internets and mediaeval architecture - and we’ve chewed a good deal of fat over the years about various important topics - but I was genuinely puzzled as to why he’d had his mind blown by something like that.

Fast forward a couple of years and reader, I joined the company. And they’ve got an IRC channel; just for work. And its a fucking productivity tool. And it’s mind-blowing.

Its mind blowing because a) Its the old rule of ‘the simplest of tools have the most profound effect*’ writ large and b) its made me realise that a number of modern, sexy, whizzy applications that some companies spend actual money on are just gilded lilies; resource heavy, time expensive re-imaginings of something that was pretty much perfectly realised in 1988.

The only improvements from what you might call ‘IRC Basic’ that Isotoma have in place - and someone will presumably correct me if I’m wrong - is that there’s a bot who reports SVN commits as kills - complete with Unreal Tournament sound effects for double, triple, ultra and mega kills.)**

And that’s basically it. The whole company - in house and remote - on one channel, everyone with ops. And it works. And it’s wonderful. I’ve hastily thrown together some of the reasons I think this.

• Everyone knows what’s going on. There’s no eternal internal email hell. There’s one internal place for everything from “What’s for lunch…?” to “Has anyone seen the…” to “Fire alarm drill at…”. Everyone is on and, because of the non-linear nature of IRC, when they’re not available its easy to leave a message.
• There’s a feeling of social cohesion that comes right out of the box. The overall rules of the channel are easy to grasp for new starters - and quite satisfyingly complex should you wish to analyse it that far. (And you don’t. You really don’t).

(Note: There’s a much longer blog post in this, but its always been my contention that a) IRC is in general the most civil of web based communication mediums and that b) Pretty much all ‘web based’ social conventions are born or find their antecedents in the conventions of IRC channels. But that’s another story for another time….)

• It acknowledges that there’s always going to be dicking around, and the social norms - of our channel, at least - kind of encourage that too. But the dicking around is metered, on-record and public - so on one hand you’ve got encouragement of a friendly workplace; while on the other you’ve got quite a powerful tool that tells you when someone needs to be busier.
• The bot that reports SVN commits is useful as it allows senior developers to say “Aha! Person X has changed that file, let me go and check it.” and the Unreal Tournament sound effects are a (tiny, miniscule) pat on the back when you’re really cracking through it. (Let’s not get into an argument about quantity over quality of commits. Suffice to say, if you’re confident enough to repo something then you’re at least *trying*)
• Finally, and most importantly for me, its a great tool for short, technical questions that really easily fall down the cracks between Trac, staging, live and documentation sources like wikis and specs. So for example today I could see that Ticket X said that “N work” had been done, but I couldn’t see where that work had been deployed (Because I’m new, not because of some process failure.) I could either traipse around the office asking various people what was going on - or I could just dump the question into the channel and be sure that pretty soon I’d have an answer.

So at Isotoma we’re using IRC as an internal email client, an IM tool, a meeting space, a status feed, a Facebook wall, a Basecamp substitute, a noticeboard and a means of executing a particularly vicious form of mob justice. There are even most of the aspects of Wave that hipsters are wetting their pants about. Not bad for something that in Internet years is about as old as its possible to be.

In fact I’m beginning to think that if someone were to put together a simple installer with a little GUI and some relatively intelligent auto-config goodness, you could actually kick start a mini IRC renaissance in the kinds of agencies who are alwayslooking for new ways of improving internal comms and organisation. In other words: All of them.

I’m kind of expecting a few replies to this post along the lines of “Of course we use IRC in our office. Who doesn’t?” So to be clear, I’m talking mainly about web agencies at the mar-comms end of the spectrum who are, let’s face it, the least well organised, the most desperate for organisation and the most likely to spring for a few thousand dollars worth of enterprise level appallingness in order to try to attain it.

I’d say to all of them: Give it a whirl.

Finally, and most importantly, #bunnies FTW!

* Even more profoundly, the simplest application of the simplest of tools.

** Actually, its also integrated to a certain extent with the company Squeezebox with a bot that reports what’s currently playing and allows a basic “skip this song” voting mechanism. There’s also pubbot who essentially spouts Markov chains to general amusement.