In these comments, the organization of a Drupal theme contest came up again. This idea has been discussed many times before. I promised to communicate more about what the Drupal Association is doing, so I can tell you that a theme contest has been discussed a few times already within the General Assembly.

Actually, as a Permanent Member, Earl Miles wrote a detailed proposal for such a contest. The Association was discussing some of the implementation details, but the project has been delayed a bit because more pressing issues, such as organizing DrupalCon Barcelona, researching a sound membership structure, and tackling the drupal.org infrastructure had to be addressed first.

So, I expect the theme contest idea to be discussed again in the near future.