I can't say I've ever seen some Nokia employee officially come to these boards and say thanks or congratulations - or offering help - to any of the developers here. May well be that I've missed those threads.
I'm assuming some of the regulars her are indeed Nokia employees but it would be nice if they sometimes could be posting here with more of 'on behalf of Nokia'.
Or is it that Nokia as a company doesn't care about the developments being done and that it's just some Nokia-employed-NIT-lovers that do it on their spare time?

I'm sure they care. It's just a matter of what they're officially allowed to say on behalf of Nokia.

(Corporate politics and whatnot)

From what I understand of the situation... neither of your options are really "correct." It seems that, yes, Nokia employees who post here do so in their free time because they're just as excited about the tablets as the rest of us are. But, that doesn't mean they can't post any insider info. There have been some posts here that give little hints or information we didn't know before.

But, that's not to say that Nokia doesn't care about this community. In fact, Nokia pays all the bills for the server, and lets the community decide what should be done with it, and supports whatever decision we make. The community council comes in here. They're kind of a proxy between Nokia and the rest of the community.

Finally, Nokia DOES recognize community developers. If you take a look at the new maemo select, page... two out of the three applications there are developed by community members.

Hope this clears things up about the role Nokia plays in this community... I didn't see one with a quick search, but is there some wiki page that outlines exactly how Nokia interacts with the community? Should one be created?

In short - yes, you did miss those threads. There's a larger number of Nokians here. Usually qgil is the most visible, but also Peter@Maemo Marketing - I guess they speak on behalf of Nokia in these matters.

Even on IRC, mailing lists Nokians engage us and discuss. There's often offers of help and I can only say that I have, as a developer gotten more help than I ever could have imagined.

And definitely Nokia people also say "Thanks" or "Congratulations".

I think they try to keep it informal to give it an open view, instead of a Nokia driven view. They're definitely here.

Thanks, that's great. Is there an official Nokia site like that - that also features non-N900 applications. That site seems to be all about N900 as that's the only device that shows under the device listing.

Depending on your criteria of 'official', http://tableteer.nokia.com and http://maemo.org/downloads might be just that

Hi, following maemo.org is part of my daily job. I have so much fun here that you can find me online and even posting on evenings and weekends as well. There are other Nokia employees that come here frequently, officially or not.

We do say thanks and congratulations. We do help as well.

But even more importantly (in my opinion at least) we do trust this community and this is why we fund a lot of maemo.org work by funding the maemo.org team and the server infrastructure, we let the community organize about 2/3 of the Maemo Summit and so on.

I hope all this shows Nokia's support and recongition to the work being done by this community.

Bummer, you could have made that claim up until around mid 2006... but ever since then it hasn't been valid. So I have to wonder why someone who joined in May of this year and has 24 posts can make such a broad declaration... especially when a little time spent searching the forum would have shown otherwise.