On Sunday, the 14th of December 2008, at 20:00-22:00 UTC, we're planning on having a bootstrapping meeting for the Mer Project. This will take place in #maemo-meeting on IRC, at irc.freenode.net. If you don't have an IRC client, you can use Mibbit (select IRC: FreeNode and #maemo-meeting as channel)

The Mer platform is a Linux distribution for mobile devices based on the Maemo platform from Nokia. Mer goals include:

* Improving and developing parts of Maemo that are of interest to the Maemo community.
* Making it easier to port existing desktop applications by hildonizing and adjusting them to the tablet form factor.
* Encouraging third party experimentation and development.
* Supporting outdated tablet hardware no longer supported by Nokia.
* Making Maemo a generic platform for all tablet devices, including non-Nokia ones.
* Stop seeing the tablets as strictly under-powered embedded systems, and see them for what they really are: powerful, power-efficient, economical handheld computers.

Mer platform development will be done in the open, with public VCS repositories, bugtrackers, and Wiki-based blueprint discussion.

The purpose of the meeting is to get the project started, discuss our short and long term goals, and get organized.

We have a blueprint which will serve as basis for the discussion - it is not a final blueprint for the project. The blueprint includes initial sketches for teams and areas that the project will cover, and if you have any interest in contributing to the Mer project in any of these areas, feel free to participate.

You don't have to be an expert or a developer - everyone who is willing to help out is welcome We will also need some participants to pioneer as initial team leaders, to get the project started. Participation in the project will be open, and presence at the bootstrapping meeting is not a requirement.

The agenda of the meeting, will be introductions at first and indicating which areas you have interest in contributing to, and then discussion on how to get the project going.

The logs will be made available after the meeting has ended. It is the goal that the project will officially start in January 2009, but before that can happen infrastructure, developer tools and organization needs to be in place.

We have already done some initial discovery work regarding Mer in previous iterations, screenshots of our alpha can be seen here
and at here

Hope to see you there,
Stskeeps/Carsten V. Munk

Here is a log from the meeting:

mer-bootstrapping-20081214