For the people interested in helping out in the Mer focus area on the developer meeting, I've put up my high-level and sub goals for the focus area on the wiki. Quoting straight from wiki:

The high level goal of this focus area is to bring Mer closer to 1.0, which is meant to be the first day-to-day usable release on Nokia Internet Tablets. Maemo5 will be in beta stage at this point and and we should be able to provide Fremantle APIs and a Maemo4 replacement to Nokia N8x0(W) users when Maemo5 is out.

The hope is to be able to use the synergy of bringing so many Maemo and Mer related personalities together, to be able to move ahead on things that would take longer if having to be done online.

Sub-goals, which serve as guidelines for activities:

* Control panels to be able to control behavior of your tablet.
* Developer tools - builders, cross compilation environments and IDEs
* Artwork and UI design: Icons, themes, backgrounds, animations, shining up interfaces through code, etc.
* Hardware interfacing and event-reaction daemons (implementing behavior similar to or better than Maemo4)
* Integration with maemo.org both on a organizational (relation to council, community) and technical level (package and image builders, repositories)
* Alignment with Maemo5 APIs and integration of Nokia-closed software in restricted images.
* Chasing down showstopper bugs which would hinder user adoption of Mer 1.0.
* Discussions on Mer after 1.0 and presentations on Mer to potential users and developers.
* Getting the Mer project developers and contributors together for the first time.

So, here's the deal. You can probably already see areas that need improvement, based on your experience with our release images up until now.

If you're interested in helping out and have time and ability to show up for the developer meeting, go to http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/HackfestCopenhagen09 . There you can edit&copy the template, and then follow the instructions.

We hope to use this information to structure the development better within the Mer area (and our development up to the time of the developer meeting).

If you would like to request sponsorship for travel and accommodation, point me to your intentions (private message me here or mail me), and I'll make a reference based on your intentions, expertise, past contributions if any and how your intentions fit in the overall goals of the Mer focus area.

If you intend to request sponsorship, please publish your intentions (and get a reference) as soon as possible so Nokia has time to work it out.