That's cool!!
Please checkout
http://kopete.kde.org/ for more information about developing kopete.
To join the development, you can join the developer mailinglist at
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel
Next release will be with kde 3.5.6 (next week or so)
Dunno what changes are included, i'm not member of kopete develop team and did not follow development latelly (perhaps bram85 can tell more about that).
Regards, Rinse