I think you should open up 2 or 3 spots for the developer/entrepreneur community so that they can air their concerns and progress with epayments thus far. I totally understand why it should be an invite only event and so it should be. However, we have a number of promising initiatives in providing merchant tools for local merchants whose progress has been stalled because they never managed to get audience of either the EcoCash folks or the ZimSwitch folks. At the end of the day, the usage and success of these folks APIs and epayment tools will be a function of developer and provider adoption, which in turn can only be promoted through networking and trust establishment. Epayment remains backward because banks and MNOs don't trust or know developers enough to open up their APIs to them. As long as the developers are not brought to the table, that will remain the case and nothing productive will ever come out. I pray the panel be expanded beyond these corporate entities.
How you could select the developer community reps? Well, i have a suggestion: get 1 team working on payments and one merchant trying to provide an e-commerce solutions to his/her clients. That way you hear the needs of both parties. Have all interested parties apply for these slots with prototypes/demos and then select one with substantial enough progress to join the discussion.