As an irregular user of instant messaging myself, I'm curious about how it's being used by other folks around campus. I know the library is making use of IM for it's "IM a Librarian" service, and last I heard, the ITRC was following their lead (although I haven't seen any further information about this recently).

Beyond that, I'm sure that many ITS groups are using IM discussions internally to communicate, but as far as I know, none of this is happening in a formalized way. My guess is that most of them are using AIM rather than IRC, so access to the discussions is based on buddy lists, rather than use of a central server. Our group was using IRC, when our offices were distributed between buildings, but we gave it up once we moved to the same suite in ITS Franklin.

I guess what I'm feeling around for here is some kind of informal, cross-group communication within ITS. In my case, given that so much of my job is trying to figure out who does what within the division, I'd like to be able to ask simple organizational questions to an audience of savvy folks. Perhaps it's the kind of thing the CTC would like to feature as part of it's "Campus Peer Groups". Or maybe it already exists, and I'm just in the dark…

So how do you use instant messaging?