I set up a temporary conference on the Jabber IM network as an experiment and held it open for about 2 weeks, but there was very little activity.
Everyone seemed to feel that IRC was sufficient and adding an IM option was undesirable, so I ended the experiment.
If you do prefer IM, the Jabber servers are open (www.jabber.org), and so is the software used to run the services.
The Psi client is available via apt-get or RPM and is an excellent tool.  GAIM also supports Jabber, although not as well as Psi.
You can set up a MUC (MultiUserConference) in Jabber pretty easily on many of the open servers by just opening a conference window specifying the conference name.

==Joseph++

P.S. The original thread to set up the MUC conference starts at (http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/lurker/message/20050127.203605.b2553e1c.en.html).
The instructions for connecting to Jabber are at (http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/lurker/message/20050128.203706.5c26e7c7.en.html)


George wrote:
> I seem to remember that someone had put up an instant messaging server (I
> think that might be what you call it) a while back and offered it up for
> PLUGers to use.
> 
> Does anybody remember the URL/IP???
> 
> Is it still available???
> 
> 
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