The European Extremely Large Telescope

is in its detailed design phase until the end of 2010. During this period, the telescope design is being consolidated and instrument and operation concepts are being studied. The scientific users are feeding back requirements into the project in numerous ways. One of them, the Design Reference Science Plan, was an opportunity for the entire community to provide direct feedback to the project. Here, we summarise the first results from this study. The full report will appear in the first half of 2010. As the detailed design phase of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) progresses at a rapid pace, the scientific users are continuously injecting requirements into the project. The E-ELT Project includes a science office staffed by around ten researchers (the majority being post-docs, i.e. young future users of the facility), and it is continuously assisted on scientific issues by an external Science Working Group (SWG), established in early 2006, and comprising about 20 senior researchers from the community. A Design Reference Mission (DRM) was set up by the SWG and served as reference for about 20 high priority science cases that have been simulated in detail (the first reports are available on the project web pages 1). The outcome of these science cases is being used to drive the telescope and instrument requirements. However, a very broad, direct input from the community was missing until a year ago. This was the reason for launchin