There are times when I hunger for IETF chat rooms in between IETF meetings. Some mailing list discussions suffer from latency + piling on. I understand that IM chat rooms would often suffer from lack of attendance, but a sort of interim meeting could get called on IM much more often than physical interim meetings, and might help resolve disagreements / reach consensus more quickly and with less effort than e-mail (consensus would still have to be confirmed on-list, of course).
Nico --
