Global Voices Online

(Thanks to Erica George of the Berkman Center whose guidelines I've plagiarized.)

1. Download & install an IRC client for your computer. This is the program that will let you access IRC, just like a web browser is the program that lets you access web pages. Here are links to IRC clients for Windows users and for Mac users.
(I use Chatzilla, which works easily as a plugin with Mozilla Firefox browsers. Download it here.)

2. Connect to irc.freenode.net. How exactly you do this will depend on which client you install, but you should be able to find support pages online for any good client program.
(In Chatzilla, all you do is type irc://irc.freenode.net into your Firefox browswer window - but this only works after you've downloaded the Chatzilla plugin.)

3. Once you are connected to irc.freenode.net, create a username for yourself. This will identify you to the other people in the IRC channels you join.

4. Join the channel “globalvoices” - again, how you do this will depent on which client you're using.
(In chatzilla, all you need to do is type irc://irc.freenode.net/#globalvoices into your Firefox browser window.)

5. Once you've joined the channel, you'll be able to see everything anyone else in that channel says, and you can say things to the rest of the channel.

For more resources see this IRC tutorial and the Freenode info page.