I'm agree about moving discussions to forums. IRC has been an obstacle for OpenACS and dotLRN development at times, because of significant absences during meetings and other threading issues. Not everyone can connect during a particular scheduled duration, and IRC does not promote thoughtful/thorough responses within the contextual time frame. IRC is also biased toward developer participation instead of the greater community. Forums/email are ubiquitous; and these forums are very responsive to hosting productive threads over a few hours or day.
