Hi Frank,
For IRC, you can look at this page: https://openacs.org/irc It's a good place to get to know a lot of the other OpenACS developers.
I look forward to seeing your demo, or even just some screenshots. I have similar concerns about screenshots of our old intranet system, so I understand why you're trying to make it anonymous.
I'm still not completely clear on what Project/Open is, but it does seem like it might be a good fit with dotWRK. Perhaps these will be separate packages that will complement project-manager?
I'm in the west coast of the United States.
I'd be happy to help a little with the porting.
