The eventual winner of our contest to pick a team project was xbmc, an open source media platform. After exploring the website and wiki, it looks to be a really neat project and there are lots of opportunities to contribute to it.
So, the assignment this time was to join their IRC channel and the dig around a bit. After reading up a bit on the ins and outs of how to behave in an IRC and some of the commands needed to navigate, I was off to explore. After listing all the available channels, it seems to be a lot of activity that doesn't have much to do with the actual project. This is just at first glance, though, I have not had a chance to really get into it yet. There were some gamers chatting about various obscure games, lots of hyperlinks to non-relevant websites, some spam, and a few channels that looked legit.
One really cool thing that I liked was that this appears to be a global community of people in here. I saw a little German, some French, Spanish, and Russian channels that were available to join. I might join one of the French ones just to brush up.
As per part two of the assignment, I also registered for the xbmc forum. This looks like the real meat and potatoes of the developer side of things. I picked a thread on Python scripts and plugin development, and there were posts with example code as well as developer discussion about current fixes they were working on. It seems as though the IRC was mainly filled with end-users just hanging out, and the forum is where the developers discuss the project and code. In fact, most threads leading to specific forums said either "coders only" or "not for end-user whining".
What I will probably do while working on whatever fix or contribution our group decides on taking on, will start our own channel in the IRC to communicate with each other. And then use the forum to talk with developers and post whatever problems we encounter in the process. This is really starting to look like fun!
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