More About Integrating IRC into DrProject
May 29th, 2008
Kosta has posted some more thoughts about integrating IRC into DrProject. He’s still working on mechanisms, but I’m looking ahead to the user interface. In particular, how should IRC logs be displayed? His first pass will be a “magic” wiki page that conversation entries are appended to (or possibly one separate “magic” page for each IRC conversation topic). That will work for short projects, but:
- What happens with something like DrProject itself, which could have tens of thousands of lines of conversation after a year has gone by? Even in undergrad course projects, there are likely to be thousands of lines in a term. Email is naturally segmented into chunks; what is the chunking (if any) for chat?
- What happens to the event log? We clearly don’t want one entry in the log for each IRC chat message—what should we show instead?
Thoughts?
You beat me, I posted a new post with more details: http://drprojectirc.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/plan-for-logs-pt-3/
What’s wrong with displaying logs by date?
The first step will be doing just that and then seeing how search handles this. Jeff gave me a cool idea – have event log on the side of the chat log. When a user clicks on a link in the event log, it will display a portion of chat log within, say 15 minutes (configurable) of the event in the event log. If we couple it with tagging (only for tickets, change sets, etc. mentioned in the chat), I think it would be pretty decent for navigation.
Could have a DrProject IRC bot and some sort of meeting command, as such:
Message to drprojectbot: meeting start “Dr.Project IRC
Reply from drproject: Meeting log started.
Integration discussion”
.. discussion ensues
Message to drprojectbot: meeting end
Reply from drproject: Meeting log “Dr. Project IRC Integration discussion” saved.
Only meeting logs show up in the event log. Complete daily logs are accessible elsewhere.
The problem with that is people might forget to use it. Many conversations over IM tend to stray off-topic, and vice-versa. What if something important was said when drprojectbot was not listening?
@Kostas: If it happens on IRC, could have a retroactive logging function:
Message to drprojectbot: meeting capture [from timestamp] [to timestamp] “Meeting name”
But yes… it’s a cool feature, but in real life, people probably wont use it unless someone is assigned responsibility to do it.