Progressive Faith Con Blog

We’ve made progress in finding folks to transcribe Saturday’s panels for the irc channel so that non-local folks can "listen in." Michelle (from Pearlbear’s Blog) has graciously agreed to transcribe the morning’s first panel, "Roots and Branches;" Alex (from Faith in Public Life) has graciously offered to transcribe the afternoon panel "Faith and Politics." If we can find one more transcriber, that person will do "Talking Tech" after lunch, though even if not I think we’re in good shape.

(The other sessions during the day will be breakout groups. Since we’ll be in multiple groups simultaneously, there’s no way to transcribe everything that’s said during those times. We’ll just have to hope that some of the participants choose to liveblog them, or to take notes and blog them afterwards.)

Anyway, if you’re not able to join us in person and you’d like to listen in via irc, here’s what you do:

(Instructions nicked from this Global Voices Online page, and slightly modified.)

1. Download & install an IRC client for your computer. This is the program that will let you access IRC, just like a web browser is the program that lets you access web pages. Here are links to IRC clients for Windows users and for Mac users.

(I use Ircle, which was made for Macs and which you can download here; many people recommend Chatzilla, which works easily as a plugin with Mozilla Firefox browsers. Download it here.)

2. Connect to irc.freenode.net. How exactly you do this will depend on which client you install, but you should be able to find support pages online for any good client program.

(In Chatzilla, all you do is type irc://irc.freenode.net into your Firefox browser window - but this only works after you’ve downloaded the Chatzilla plugin.)

3. Once you are connected to irc.freenode.net, create a username for yourself. This will identify you to the other people in the IRC channels you join.

(In chatzilla, all you need to do is type irc://irc.freenode.net/#progfaithblogcon into your Firefox browser window.)

5. Once you’ve joined the channel, you’ll be able to see everything anyone else in that channel says, and you can say things to the rest of the channel.

For more resources see this IRC tutorial and the Freenode info page.

It’s probably worth downloading the client and fiddling with it a little bit in advance, to make Saturday easier. But don’t expect the #progfaithblogcon channel to be open until Saturday morning shortly before the first session. We’ll open it then, and it will remain open all day. Feel free to drop in and out, or to hang out all day and natter with whoever else is there.

During the open sessions, we’ll keep an eye on the channel, and will relay questions from remote folks to the general gathering as best we can.

Just a few more days now…!