HANG ON, LONTAHV!
My understanding was that we would look at the ages on our own, scoring them from 1-5 on each of the criteria. We would then come together to discuss and collate our thoughts and scores for each age.
To do this, we need to have a week to properly look at the ages in depth. Only then would we be able to announce a winner.
Two other points:
1 Not everyone uses IRC, nor have they any desire to. It would be more appropriate to select a tool that everyone on the judging team is comfortable with (and to discuss it with colleagues before setting it up

).
2 7 pm EST is in the middle of the night for Europeans, which is where all the other judges live.
Of course, if the Writers on the judging team want to get together and do their individual work via IRC that's fine by me. But when we come to pool everyone's thoughts, it really needs to be via a single user-friendly channel such as MSN or Yahoo or Teamspeak or the chat channel on the GoMa site, which you mentioned in an earlier post.