IRC offers a more interactive experience for exchanging ideas and information than on the mailing list.  CloudStack has three IRC channels that people can join on irc.freenode.net

• #cloudstack - For CloudStack users and developers to collaborate on problems in deploying and using CloudStack.  This channel mirrors the cloudstack-users mailing list.
• #cloudstack-dev - For CloudStack developers to collaborate on development in general.
• #cloudstack-meeting - For CloudStack developers to host meetings.  There is one held every Wednesday.

Guidlines

• Have fun - IRC is as close to social interaction as most of the folks in a distributed project will get on a regular basis. 
• Don't ask to ask, just ask. 
• Don't make decisions on IRC.  You can, have discussions, form opinions and even have an an agreement on IRC; but that agreement ought to be brought to the mailing list before it is final.
• Default to open - discuss things prominently in the public channels. 
• Spontaneous discussions and ad hoc meetings are fine, but if you are scheduling a get together use the mailing list to establish an IRC meeting time so anyone who's interested can join the meeting.
• Use #cloudstack-meeting for meetings and #cloudstack-dev and #cloudstack for posting questions and general discussion. 
• Use bots to record the meeting and publish the meeting the mailing list so everyone can benefit from the conversation. 

Meetings on IRC

CloudStack has weekly meetings on IRC. ASFbot dutifully records meetings when told to, and will even send minutes to the mailing list. Ad hoc meetings can also be useful to log, so don't hesitate to put ASFbot to use.

ASFbot meeting commands

There are other non-meeting commands covered below. But this should get you started. each of these commands needs to be addressed to ASFbot by prefixing his name (and a colon) to any command. In example: ASFbot: startmeeting

• meeting start - starts the meeting
• meeting end - ends the meeting
• meeting send - sending the meeting to cloudstack-dev mailing list (if the meeting is held in #cloudstack-meeting) 

In addition during the meetings, you can pass the following commands without addressing ASFbot: 

• #topic - Sets the topic in the meeting. 
• [off] - takes the content that follows off the record; content following this will not be logged (on the same line as this command) 
• #info - Information specifically called out notes in the meeting minutes. 

ASFbot generally

ASFbot lives in #cloudstack-dev and provides a number of services including commits, jira updates, etc. 

Full documentation lives here: 

http://people.apache.org/~humbedooh/asfbot.html

Tips

• Setup filters to filter out the JIRA messages, join/leave messages, and commits - if if annoys you - otherwise bask in the flow of information. 
• Feel free to idle in the channel - you don't have to pay attention all the time. Highlights will draw your attention if someone specifically reaches out to you. 
• Consider running an IRC bouncer to keep in the loop of everything that is happening, even when you are disconnected.