So BRaTS@home just did an online discussion via an IRC channel web interface, which was totally awesome. People could just pick a screen name, join the room and throw questions at the project's admin/representative.

Iyam, making an IRC-like feature part of the standard BOINC distribution for projects would be great. Project's representatives could announce dates at which they're available for answering questions or presentation of news/results and discussion (i.e once a month). Imo an interactive feature like that could vastly improve the communication between the project's admins/scientists on the one side and its participants on the other side and by that do a great job in motivating, educating and keeping participants up to date.