Chat is more commonly known as a public communications tool, mostly used on public, uncontrolled servers in a form of internet CB radio. For this reason, many people are hesitant to accept IRC as a business tool. The secret is the use of a private IRC server. Such a server was installed at IEEE headquarters and is password protected to avoid outside people from clogging the server with non-IEEE business. The rest of the secret is the use of some simple yet powerful protocols.
Every meeting has a facilitator that controls the flow of the meeting.
For a good example of how this works, see the URL in the bibliography for the log of a past meeting. The log of the meeting is another great tool. These included email, private newsgroups, and web postings. We will look at some of the tools in detail. The first rule of working together is identifying who a message is for and thus how it will be read.