I'm all for chat, it takes me back to my early days debating creationists when I frequented the Yahoo! science chat rooms.
I'm with Theodoric though that arranging a common IRC chatroom name might be a better solution, but if the previous instance of chat is anything to go by there probably wouldn't be enough traffic to try and establish a permanent channel just an ad hoc agreement to use something like #EvCForum on a specific IRC net.
TTFN,
WK