I've made pretty good progress on the upgrade over the last couple weeks. If you take a look at the explorer network you will see a 0.16.0 node. I believe I have all the riecoin changes implemented. I was able to sync the chain starting from scratch. The gui is close to complete as well. I have a few more things I need to test. I'm hoping to release a version of the code in a couple weeks for more extensive testing.

Can someone give me a list of seed nodes to use? Should I use the list of nodes on page 284?

Are there any testnet nodes running?

Are there any dns seeds?

We will need to decide which of the bitcoin softforks we want to implement. The code is all there. It is just a matter of activating them. If we choose to activate them we might need to update miners to use a new block version.