Doubts about voice chat
Voice Chat: Andrew, please no! I am one of those persons getting very distracted by people talking in the same room and I am one of those nasty guys requesting fellows to take a cigarette break (even if they do not smoke), when they start lenghtly discussions. Also you should consider, that written English seems much easier than talking for non-native speaker. Specially if you consider the heavy accent some native speakers have. Well, and you don't want to know how often I do dictionary lookups on IRC chats even today...
No, voice chat is no good for software colloberation - I guess.
Besides all you say, Andrew's examples are about single task activities where all people involved are very focused on that single task.
Also, you can skim through hundreds of mails and irc logs in a normal day, while it would be impossible to just do that with voice recordings. Voice recordings are just unusable for persistence and documentation.
Voice conference calls are already used in the community, for instance, in the gnome foundation board meetings and it looks like it's not near being a good solution, even if it's used by a reduced group of people with a very precise agenda.
Anyhow... let's see the use cases!
Just another observation.
If you want to look to the space shuttle or ISS communications channels, they involve a single point of control for the communication. At NASA it's CAPCOM, and that person has absolute control over the communications that happens over the channel.
Nearly every effective multi-party radio 'network' involves a network control operator. That person does the same for the communications that happens.
I've been involved in a whole bunch of network conference calls where there is not a call coordinator. In nearly every one of them the call ends up being monopolized by managers or people who are not able to work on the specific issue the call is supposed to address.
When a bridge line or conference call has a specific person in charge, and a clear set of rules in how to get information shared on the call, things should work well. However they aren't for everyone, and there are a lot of network control operators that you really don't want in charge of your calls as well.
One of the unstated aspects that IRC has going for it is that it is possible to filter out people who are not contributing to the issue. That's almost impossible on an audio bridge line.
As far as setting one up, using an astrisk server to host a conference call of voip clients should be almost a no brainer.
I agree that voice chat is not a good idea.
1. For most of us computer nerds, typing is no problem. We can type plenty fast.
2. In text chats you don't have to wait your turn. You just type and it's there in order of who hit the enter key. In voice chat only one person can talk at a time. With too many people in the chat, it creates a showting match.
3. Text is archived more easily. I have no problem reading through logs of previous chats. Listening to them would be a real PITA.
4. Not everyone has a headset or microphone. Everyone does have a keyboard.
I hate trying to pronounce code, or even function names or project names. And I feel bad when I don't understand peoples' accents though I know they are trying really hard.
That, plus timezone offsets. IRC is more suitable for lagged conversations than voice chats :)
Plus, my awful pronunciation as a native french guy, whereas my written english is OK.
Yup, I don't like the idea either. I think it's mostly a gamer thing, and it'll probably stay that way. It's one of the few applications where voice chat makes a lot of sense.