Talis

Lately I've been hanging out in #talis on IRC. It's a corporate IRC channel, but unlike other companies (like mine) they've put it on a public server where anyone can find it and join in. Not only that, but some of the staff blogs point out that they can usually be found there.

Well, that seemed like an open invitation, so I've been joining in for the last few days. :-)

It's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect, in that it is just discussion between staff facilitating the various tasks they are involved with. Of course, there is a lot of humor as well, which I've appreciated, since American humor is different to my own. We spell it differently, for a start!

I was particularly interested to see that they hold their daily Scrum meetings in IRC. I suppose this is necessary, given that they have people all over. The other thing is that I've enjoyed saying hello to people who's blogs or emails I've been reading for years, but have never interacted with before. Well, almost never. One of them responded to something I said at the end of a post a few years ago, and I've received very occasional emails from him ever since (and I occasionally pester him with stuff - he'll know who I mean if he's reading this). :-)

Overall, between IRC and their podcasts, they seem to be a bright group of people, and are destined to make waves in the semantic web. I'm curious to see where they go.