It's good to hear new ideas, keep them coming in! We've had the same categories (basically) for a couple of years so perhaps it's time to freshen it up

You can probably find issues with fairness whichever way you run a competition, and I can see pros and cons with both approaches (categories and no categories).

Sometimes i think we do run too many categories, but I also think having some is helpful. It's all a balancing act i guess

Hmm... I see what you're saying beresk_let and it's a good idea too But i'm thinking who is going to judge if an app is crappy or not? I don't think we could have a poll for the community to judge how good each of the entries are or we'd be all fed up with voting all the time! So that raises the idea of a selected panel who would test and judge the quality of each app? It would kinda suck for newbies and indeed suck a lot more for experienced developers to have an app ranked as poor when they worked so hard on it, it might be demoralising rather than encouraging, so we'd have to find a nice way to tell people they suck more than others at developing apps But i can see that your idea could work with some thought behind it

One way the big pot idea could work is to have a trusted maemo.org panel of reviewers/testers who would work through the entries and provide a final list for the community to judge and rank in the final order. So if there were 50 entries, the panel could narrow it down even to 10 and the community would decide the final placings. But then we'd lose a lot of the community involvement.

Bah .. i don't know, brainstorming..