The IRC Backchannel? irc://chat.freenode.net/liftconference ?

Last year we had by magic an IRC Backchannel, so:

irc://chat.freenode.net/liftconference

That's of course not official and you might find yourself alone.

(if you have an irc client, open it and type
/server chat.freenode.net
/join #liftconference
)

Careful - there's a #lift channel which is *not* related to the conference ;)