IRC is not a place to *make* decisions (unless it's an official IRC meeting - make sure the new corp. expressly notes that meetings can be online!), but it's *fantastically* valuable for sanity checking and coming up with robust ideas that people will see and go "of course, that's obviously sensible."
Exactly, that's what I see IRC's purpose being. (And yes, allowing online board meetings is on my mental list of things to change from the defaults! Full blown video conferencing [which is the legal requirement for an online discussion to count as a "meeting" in the absence of a definition to the contrary] is a little outside our budget!)