Pros and Cons of IRC meetings

Spending a lot of time in meetings this week. (Not unusual.) Most of the meetings take place over the phone, but I have a few meetings this week in IRC, including the openSUSE Project meeting that’s held bi-weekly in #opensuse-project on Freenode. Thinking about the pros and cons, it seems IRC beats out phone meetings by a hair…

Pros

There’s a lot to like about meeting in IRC (or any chat “room,” really):

• IRC meetings are loggable — you can save the discussion for later, so people can refer back to action items, or review the entire discussion if they were unable to attend.
• IRC logs (once published) are searchable — post the IRC log to the Web and it’ll be indexed by Google, so there’s a chance that you’ll turn up information that came out in a meeting by doing a quick search.
• IRC doesn’t require 100% undivided attention — if you’re participating in an IRC meeting, depending on your role in the conversation, you can also respond to email, etc., while in the meeting. (This is only true if you’re not leading the meeting or heavily involved in a discussion, though.)
• IRC doesn’t require silence. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys some music while you work, there’s no reason you can’t blast some tunes while participating in an IRC meeting. (This alone makes IRC much more attractive than phone meetings.)
• It’s clear who’s talking, and there’s less “cross-talk” than in phone meetings.
• You don’t need to repeat yourself — if someone missed something or needs to re-read an answer, they can just scroll up.
• IRC is a more “level” playing field for a multi-lingual group, in some respects. (At least, I’ve had non-native speakers tell me they’d prefer chat / IRC to a phone conversation.)
• No international dialing required — No need for people to have to maintain a call-in number for every country or require participants to dial into an international number. (Though this is mitigated if you use Skype or something that makes international calls really cheap.)

So there’s a lot to recommend IRC against phone meetings… what are the cons?

Cons

• Conversations move much more slowly — Unless everyone in the conversation is a speed typist, IRC conversations move much, much more slowly than phone conversations.
• You lose a dimension of communication – when you’re dealing with text only, you lose nuances of speech and the ability (sometimes) to tell when someone’s frustrated, happy, aggravated, sarcastic, etc.
• Computer required — With phone meetings, you can dial in from anywhere — back of a taxi, while driving to work (using a headset, of course), while taking a walk, etc. IRC is sort of demanding in this regard.
• Frustrating for slow typists — I’m not a slow typist, but I expect that IRC meetings are very frustrating for peek-and-poke typists who don’t do 80+ words per minute.
• Reduced complexity — this is sort of a con and a pro: Having a discussion in IRC typically reduces the complexity of the discussion because people just don’t invest as much time in writing as they do talking.
• IRC avoidance — some people just don’t like having to switch communications mediums, and refuse to participate in IRC. I’m not sure I consider this valid, but it’s a fact of life that a few people will simply not participate via IRC.