Why is it that you offer the members of Unity the choice of setting up a chat room and the Simple Messenger/Video Messenger on their sites but you don't actually offer these services for use by the members on Unity itself?
As long as Unity members have the choice to refuse the IM and/or block members from trying to IM them then I think it would be an added benefit to help improve the speed of communication and in turn the resolution of issues we are having.
I am also sure that many Unity members might have friends they just want to say hello to just for the sake of it.
With regards to the chat room, the agents could take turns in having a Q&A session with Unity members say once a week at an allotted time. Or to keep it more controlled you could say what the Q&A session topic might be and only questions about that topic will be answered.
What do you think?
I would love the ability to have quick and easy communication with people, along with the possibility to share files within the chat. However, an IRC channel would seem like a bit too much, and something tells me that it won't be pretty.
Perhaps the Chatroom idea would be good, it would see more