First IRC meeting

In our first IRC meeting, Fardad introduced some guidelines to us to get familiar with IRC environment and its culture. Through the meeting, we impressed the knowledge we learned from the classes. Meanwhile, we learnt lots new knowledge. There are two interested website as:
http://www.pastebin.ca is a website to copy the text and post it, then copy the url and pass the url share with your friend.
http://tinyurl.com is a website to help you make a long url short to tiny one. When you clicked the short one, it will redirect to the long one.

Starting from IRC is very good for us to get start to familiar with developing environments. For open source programming, by WIKI or IRC is very common for people communicating with their teammates.

But be honest, IRC meetings and chats are very slow. Especially when talking with an 8 people’s group, some people did not pay attention that will cause the meeting last much longer. And Fardad need to talk to all the groups that will take him longer time.
Is there better way to solve this problem?