In an effort to harness the speed and power of the dkos community, I have set up a chatroom on the IRC network EFnet. The channel is #dailykos, for those of you familiar with IRC, and it will hopefully be used during the debates to lighten to load on the dkos servers and also to discuss rapid respond strategy. We can debunk Bush's lies in real time, and organize LTE writing and calls into post-debate shows.
I have not been too impressed with the Kerry war room, and I thought that we should take matters into our hands, as best we can. By employing a grassroots operation to define the talking points, we can defeat the meme that has already started to seep into the SCLM that Bush has already won the debate. Let's play the ball on our court!
Update [2004-9-29 15:33:40 by kolors]: I forgot to make things easy by including a link to join the channel. If you already have an IRC client installed (such as Chatzilla), simply click
here.
Read on for more information on IRC and getting it set up...
For windows users:
The easiest program is probably
mIRC. Download and install that program, and once you start it up it will ask for a little bit of information. Fill out the nickname you would like to use, and the name you would like people to be able to see, and go to the server tab and select an EFnet server from the dropdown box. I personally use irc.blessed.net or irc.he.net, although any of the servers are fine. If you then hit connect to server, that should work, although you can alternatively type
/server irc.blessed.net
in the main status window. You should then connect to the server, and up will pop a channel join box. Type in #dailykos and then click Join, or type
/join #dailykos
and you should be in.
For mac users:
I do not own a mac, nor have I ever tried to IRC on one, but a little bit of googling has led me to believe that the easiest to use mac IRC client is called
Snak. If anyone has experience setting it up and can lend some instructions on how to connect to EFnet and join #dailykos, please let me know.
Once in #dailykos...
You'll see a handful of people with @'s in front of their names, those are operators who administrate the channel, change the topic, kick out rude users, etc. If the channel gets large enough and there are too many side conversations (e.g. during the debates), the operators may set the channel mode to 'moderated', preventing anyone without an @ or a + in front of their name from speaking. In that case, we will 'voice' users who are registered daily kos members (give them a + in front of their name) and allow these users to talk.
That's about all I think there is to IRC, so hopefully you'll all join us and we can become a more effective rapid response team for Kerry.