Sustainable Gardeners and Farmers
Sharing knowledge to sustain our food systems and communities
This group will create an open, global forum where growers can share practical knowledge with each other, pose questions and find answers. It is open to experts, amateurs and to beginners who look to enrich their lives by learning to grow food. It will also provide a space to share concerns about current food systems as well as sustainable approaches. I form ...learn more
GROUP DETAILS
Created: Dec 24, 2007
Updated: Nov 22, 2009
Membership: Open
Semi-Private
Test IRC Chat Widget
Here is the WiserEarth chatroom. If you want to chat with people on the site now, click on the icon below and you will be prompted to enter a nickname. You can use your real name, username or another name if you choose. Feel free to ask questions about how to best use the site, or just hang out.
You can also enter the chatroom using Pidgin, the opensource cross-platform multi-protocol IM client. Read these for instructions (Can someone help summarize the steps here?):
Comments (1 - 16 of 16)
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@Bowo: thanks will do! Just wondering how effective a fixed window for chats would be considering people live in different time zones.
Hope you take this into consideration! cheers, |
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@Utsav: Thanks for giving it a try. However, it turns out that we implemented a chat feature for groups two weeks ago. You can check it out in the Editors group homepage. Feel free to test it out and drop in any 'chatter' there. Next step would be to do a site-wide version of it when the need and occasion arise along the lines that Arash suggested.
@Phil: I like your idea of establishing fixed period time of day open for community chat. Let's keep this in mind when the site-wide implementation of the chatterbox goes live. |
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the chat application take ages to load.. i didn't even get in.. and gave up... will try the IRC some other time...
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Phil, this is good and interesting. My concern however is the use of pidgin for communications. I suggest you adopt a nother method of tutorials for interested members since not many of the groups users can access it online. Mohammed |
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To help people find others to chat with could we suggest that they join the chatroom on the hour or half-hour, this would be more successful for them than logging on at any random time.
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Arash, that's great. I'll be sure to get back to this once we have enough people who can commit to attending the chatroom. Thanks!
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Bowo,
Yes, it's technically feasible to do that. The chatterbox is setup to be attached to an entity record, and the individual messages are stored in the database as plain text comments on that record. So, we could setup a dummy wikipage and hard code a chatterbox onto it, then link to that from the home page or left navigation. |
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Arash,
I wanted to ask whether it's possible to have one 'chatterbox' for the entire community and not just for groups?
Thanks, Bowo |
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Hi Arash,
Thanks for sharing the reason why the chatroom was hidden from view and also the current 'at any given point' data of site visitors. I guess this will have to wait a bit more for public reappearance. Very good to know that groups will have a tightly-integrated 'chatterbox' module. Looking forward to try it out and see how the community will use it. |
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Hi All,
About a year ago, we had an IRC chat feature on the site, but we took it out because it didn't get used much at all. It ended up having the opposite effect than we were hoping for, because people would go to the chat room and find it empty 99% of the time. So, instead of finding a vibrant community of like-minded people, they found a big empty room. Granted, we have a lot more users now, but based on the traffic and usage patterns that we're seeing on the site, there aren't many people on the site at any given point in time.
Having said that, in the next week, or so, we're going to launch a "chatterbox' module for groups. Group admins will be able to place it on their group's homepage, and then any group member can use it as a live or asynchronous chat. The individual chat entries are retained in our database, so anyone can view the chat history at any time. It will be interesting to see if this is something that will get a lot of use by groups. |
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Phil. Just found these excellent tutorials to use Pidgin for IRC:
http://eclug.homelinux.org/content/view/192/59/ http://stfu.blogs.ablenet.org/100/how_to_connect_to_irc_with_pidgin_gaim
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I think I added an IRC account in Pidgin with the following info
Username: bowo (can be anything, but maybe best to use WE username) Server: irc.freenode.net Password: <not needed>
Click Save, and then type:
/join #wiserearth
Hope this is correct as I only did it once about two weeks ago. Let me know how it goes.
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I have Pidgin as a PortableApp http://portableapps.com/ but don't know how to set it up to connect to WE chatroom, could directions be given for non-experts like myself ?
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Thanks Phil. Yi Tan seems great. Conference call with IRC chat on the sideline. In WE we can add wikipage to the converstion for live collaborative editing. File upload for the MP3 archive is also possible.
Fyi, this chat room has just been 'reopened' last week. Promotion only went to members of WE Editors group. We can open it up to the wider community later on, perhaps by putting a link on it in the homepage.
Scheduled chat with prearranged subject sounds great. Got topic suggestions? Also chat format perhaps? (moderated/unmoderated, discussion flow, etc.). |
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Very easy to use, but not many (any) other users online.
Should there be a hosted chat with a prearranged subject arranged for set times for each time zone ?
I think that Yi Tan (Jerry Michalski) does something similar http://www.yi-tan.com/
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Doesn't have to be a fixed window. Can be more than one of course depending on who can attend to it when. We can of course imagine it to be 'open' around the clock once there's enough active community members. Thanks for the reminder Utsav.
Cheers,
Bowo