I rarely use it, but there are times when it is really helpful. You can see the length of the GUI thread...that would have been much shorter had FDR and I just had a live chat.
I think it would be useful to have a channel, even if it doesn't get much traffic.
When I'm somewhere near a keyboard, I'm quite often online on ircnet (I think the irc.xs4all.nl should be globally available, webchat at
chat.ircnet.org
), nickname is the same as my username here.
I might as well open #deviation there, seems not to be in use.