maemo.org and its relationship/dependency of Nokia is still confusing, agreed. Hopfully this confution will fade away once maemo.nokia.com is released. Some community software will be promoted in that website. If a Chinook or extras-devel app appears there, or if the description/screenshots used are outdated - you will be able to blame Nokia and only Nokia.

(our way to approach this will be not to recommend any app out of extras and with wrong/outdated information)

As for today I think Dave Neary (not a Nokia employee) is the one selecting the Pearls and I'm sure he would welcome direct feedback (in #maemo or maemo-community list, I don't think he follows regularly ITt) and help.

The idea of the Pearl being selected randomly from a set of application has been bradly discussed many times. However, for what I remember there is no enhancement request in bugzilla nor a task in the backlog. Feel free to kick this off. The execution depends nowadays on the Maemo community and the priorities set in the development of maemo.org - not anymore on Nokia.

About the selection of Fremantle stars to support already now, the discussion is not public among other reasons because such selection depends a lot on what we know about Fremantle and what we know about ongoing developments inside Nokia or by third parties. Besides, it's not that unfrequent that the selection of winners is discussed privately.

Nothing of this would stop the Maemo community discussing and selecting their Fremantle Stars publicly. In fact this would be probably a useful and exciting exercise since we are going to select just a few projects to concentrate our support on the,, even if we also think there are many more stas out there.