Thanks fellas, it was an honor to organize this year’s challenge and keep it going for another year. I enjoyed the experience.
Organizing the challenge did take quite a bit of time, but mostly because my approach was thorough. The first thing I did was study every prior challenge thread in order to see what the rules were and how they changed over the years. Every contest entry also needed to be examined because not everything was explicitly stated in the rules but could be inferred from the entries. After some deliberation about the rules I drafted this year’s challenge thread. Next I drafted a revised solicitation letter and solicited sponsors. In total, 44 companies were contacted. Seven companies responded and offered a prize. After that it was mostly a matter of maintaining the challenge thread and answering PM’s and such. There was also some housekeeping to do in the archive thread. Next I revised the existing scoresheet, and judges were solicited. Judging took me two full days because of the amount of commentary I made for every build, which formed the basis of my scores. Next I wrote some documentation to help the next organizer.
The work of the previous organizers made my job much easier. Whoever originally put together the contest archive thread, “the” or CRX maybe, had to do a ton of work. There was an existing solicitation letter, existing scoresheet, existing imgur account, and some documentation, to help me along. Revising existing documents and processes is easier than creating new ones from scratch.
Special props to whoever put together the GIF slideshow compilation (data heavy, ~414MB) for the 2020 (8th annual) challenge. That probably took a huge amount of time. I believe it was pinkpanda3310.