I'm not telling people to read the #maemo IRC logs, I'm telling people to read the meeting logs which are rarely more than a few hundred lines long.

The bigger point, though is that the council is active on IRC, so we tend to do a lot of things on IRC. It's real-time, which is helpful for discussion and understanding (you don't end up with people misunderstanding you and carrying that festering around for hours or days), it's easy to get a hold of a lot of core people quickly, and it's low-overhead. This doesn't mean you have to read the logs, only that you need to be aware that stuff does happen there.

Which mail archives? The ones on maemo.org, or the Gossamer Threads ones (which are set up just like a forum)?

Different people would participate.

If you make it an either or proposition, you get a different set of people participating in either place. There is some overlap between the mailing lists and Talk, but it's not complete (we have many more Nokians on the mailing list for starters).

If you cross-post between the two then you end up with the same problem cross-posting always causes, the same discussion taking place in two different places.

Neither of these things is desirable, which is why I'm pushing a technical solution, the vBulletin integration. Until that comes together, though, council stuff is going to -community (don't worry, it shouldn't be too long).