Thanks to the generosity of Chapter 3 and Commerce Guys, we will be holding a code sprint in San Francisco starting tomorrow (Sep 13) to upgrade CTools and Panels to D7. My sincere hope is that we can get to the point where there is an alpha release by the end of it, but even if we cant we should be able to produce something that dedicated users can start to test.

While we will have a bunch of people In the Room so to speak, we will also have online participation via IRC. I'll open #drupal-panels for this purpose. We're supposed to get started tomorrow at 10am PST. People who would like to write tests or contribute to the documentation are particularly welcome, as those will likely be the easiest tasks to work on while not in the room with us.