Meetings are scheduled for saturday night/sunday morning once a month. There isn't a future projection of meeting dates yet as we've only had two. Check or subscribe to this thread for notification of the next meeting time http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=426838.Meetings are planned to be on the last Sunday of each month at 00:01 UTC, however sometimes it changes.
The meetings take place in #ubuntuforums-unanswered, which sometimes isn't there, like now for instance, I'm not sure why this happens as I'm not a op. But it will reappear in time for the meeting. On a similar note I think it would be beneficial to try and promote participation the irc channel outside of meetings to provide a place for team members to help one another on solving technical problems or highlighting particularly difficult forum threads. The channel does exist, however there might not always be someone in there besides ChanServ (channel bot). And I agree with promotion of the channel outside of the meetings, as it could potentially be a valuable place to chat and discuss topic problems.
If you are having trouble connecting to the server, Freenode provides this applet for a web-based chat. As for a desktop client, I highly recommend XChat or XChat-Gnome.
To get an irc room list in Gaim, go to Tools -> Room List, then select your irc account and click on Get List. If you sort by name then search down for ubuntuforums you'll find the room (if it's there).Another option is to type /join #ubuntuforums-unanswered when you connect to the server.
dannyboy79: I posted the IRC link in the FAQ, although it is a little buried in there. I'll add a new sticky for it. ;)