An idea might be to start a bit earlier with the compo. Most of us have summer holidays I guess, so If we start in May, most of the development time will be during the summer.

On the other hand, I'm a student and I have a 8-10 week holiday, whereas most of you guys have jobs and have a 1-2 week holiday.

I like having a theme of some kind. It's good that the entries have "something" in common. It makes them easier to compare for the judges and people will be inspired by eachothers approaches to the theme.

The biggest problem is that people don't seem to have much time. A possible sollution would be to organize a small scale competition. We could all make a small game within a month and submit that. The goal is to create many small games with simple graphics and simple but clever gameplay, instead of just a few big games that require high-performance PC's to run.

One thing I learned during this compo, is that it's better to start small and add stuff later, than start big and having to leave things out. Maybe we could turn this idea into a plan for the next compo.

We could also try something different:

A few people write a server program that hosts some kind of game. All competitors write clients that communicate with this server. These cliens are actually players that fight eachother. We could organize a championship between these "bots" and see who wins.
The advantage here, is that everyone can focus on one thing (intelligence) instead of graphics, sound, gameplay etc.. which all require much time.

Just some idea's.