[BioC] IRC channel for BioC?

[Robert Citek]

On Jun 3, 2005, at 2:57 PM, Robert Gentleman wrote:
> My own preference is to keep things on the mailing list as much as  
> possible, because I have seldom seen bad questions (more often are  
> incomplete questions which cannot be answered with the information  
> provided) and the list is archived. This lets others learn as well,  
> and I think is something that is important.

Agreed.

> But it is entirely possible that IRC is the right thing for some  
> questions etc.

I've found that IRC[1] and IM[2] work best when a handful of people  
are working on a single type of problem requiring rapid feedback.   
Troubleshooting a bug is one example that comes to mind.  Simple one- 
on-one (or one-to-few) tutorials is another.  Personally, I view IRC  
and IM as just two pieces in a set of social software tools that  
includes mailing lists, forums, bug trackers, code repositories,  
blogs, and wikis, each of which can be archived and searched.

That said (or rather written), Dan on the #R channel pointed out to  
me that there's a wiki for posting R problems, solutions, tips,  
tricks, and links:

   http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome

Is there a similar wiki for BioConductor?  Not that we couldn't put  
bioconductor info on the R wiki.

[1] IRC : Internet Relay Chat, aka chatroom
[2] IM : Instant Messaging

Regards,
- Robert