I see some projects have started putting up public SIP conference rooms in combination with their mailing lists and irc channels. One is the freeswitch[0] project. The GNU Audio Community should be pioneering in this effort, in my opinion;). The topic would be the same as LAU; discuss music production, problems and software and whatever really;). There are some public SIP servers[1] that allows dynamic creation of conference rooms. The way it works is that you can call any number beginning with a certain prefix and you'll enter a conference room. If anybody else calls this number, they will of course join the conference. If anybody would like to try and see if they meet someone, you can call: sip:1-222-GNU-AUDIO@proxy01.sipphone.com Substitute the GNU-AUDIO with the corresponding letters. The complete SIP URI will then be: sip:1-222-468-28346@proxy01.sipphone.com Maybe in the future we can host our own server if this works out. Some other projects got a bot in irc which notifies of JOIN AND QUIT in the conference room. To get a SIP soft phone, you can check out the various free software projects at voip-info[2], specifically the SIP soft phone clients page[3]. Be aware that not all projects on that page is free software. If you need a terminal client, check out asterisk[4]. You can also run your sip phone through JACK;). A GUI client might be ekiga[5]. [0]http://www.freeswitch.org [1]http://http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/servers.html [2]http://voip-info.org [3]http://voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=VOIP+Phones#SoftPhonesvoiceonly [4]http://asterisk.org [5]http://ekiga.org -- Esben Stien is b0ef@e s a http://www. s t n m irc://irc. b - i . e/%23contact [sip|iax]: e e jid:b0ef@ n n