I believe slack does have a IRC gateway. A webbased irc client that doesn't suck (and keeps a channel log) would probably be a good solution to making things e

I believe slack does have a IRC gateway. A webbased irc client that doesn't suck (and keeps a channel log) would probably be a good solution to making things easy for people unfamiliar with IRC. Some sort of one click setup for a channel on Freenode or a similar network would probably be pretty popular - especially if you could get some useful bots from the get go (like git ones) .