I agree that an IRC meeting will be a good thing, but please not Tuesday 21 GMT. Wednesday is much better for me. Also 20 GMT is better than 21 (I am at GMT+3, and next day will be a workday).

As for basing on Mer...

I suggest to declare two principles:
- we are going to keep n900 working and full-functional; if some tech decision leads to limiting phone n900 functionality compared to original, than it is a bad decision and we should avoid it;
- we are going to match debian packaging quality - never allow packages to install to /home/user, never allow packages to touch files owned by other packages, follow debian policy whenever possible, etc

As long as we can keep with these pronciples, we may use things from Mer.