Challenge Overview
The theme of this challenge is to provide insight and assistance to challenge authors, challenge participants, or challenge administrators in their use of the Topcoder platform. As crowdsourcing is becoming more mainstream, more people are creating and participating in challenges on Topcoder but use of this two-sided marketplace isn’t necessarily intuitive. There are a number of conventions and expectations which are part of interacting with Topcoder and achieving successful outcomes regardless of the user’s role. For new challenge authors, determining proper scope and reward levels can be difficult. How many requirements and what is the number of features that can be approached in single atomic challenge? How many prizes should they offer? Competitors want to know how many submitters typically compete in challenges for a certain technology or platform. How long does it take a new member to become competitive on the platform? How much money can they expect to earn if they compete regularly. A challenge manager might want to know how many UI Prototype challenges are currently in flight before launching his own or how many members have previously worked on challenges with a certain technology.
Your application for this Hackathon-type challenge can take many forms:
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A web service
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CLI tool
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A mobile application
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A web application
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A desktop client
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Browser extension
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An Atom plugin
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A chat-bot
What we’re looking for here is tools that provide insight to some aspect or aspects of the challenge management, creation or participation process. Scope, technology, and prize money are obvious input variables to investigate for challenge authors. Prizes, milestone dates, registration, and submissions are important to competitors.
Some questions to consider:
- What kind of challenges have the highest participation?
- What effect does registration have on submissions?
- How could challenges be marketed by authors and Topcoder more effectively?
- Is Topcoder more successful with some technologies than others?
- Does the difficulty or complexity of a challenge affect its chance of success? How could that be measured?
We’re providing a JSON file(s) (separate listing and detail) with multiple years of challenge data that is an export of the data provided by the Topcoder Challenge endpoint. Use of this data is optional. Here is the link to the data: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByjxTGykXQjAbjJNVjBWazAxdEk
Restrictions:
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You may only use public open source 3rd-party libraries that are available for commercial use. You may ask questions in the forums if clarification is required.
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There are no platform/language restrictions.
Evaluation Criteria
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Your application will be subjectively judged for (1) usefulness (50%), (2) creativity(25%) , and (3) quality(25%) by Topcoder staff and reviewers.
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For this challenge, you are preparing demo-able not production-ready code. You don’t need to handle every edge condition for each use case that you implement. The application should implement some error handling/logging but it doesn’t need to be as thorough as it would for a production system.
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Your application should be generally functional for the use cases that you do implement and shouldn’t crash. We’re expecting working applications. You may describe assumptions/unmet edge conditions in your features.txt file but if these assertions are too broad and your app is constantly breaking or crashing you will lose points on the quality part of the scoring criteria.
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Please prepare a deployment steps in your README.md so Topcoder reviewers can get your code up and running easily.
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Please don’t modify deployed code after the submission deadline. The review staff will be checking timestamps to validate.
Final Submission Guidelines
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A zip file containing the code and README.md file containing deployment instructions for your solution
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The root folder of your zip file should also contain a text file (features.txt) which describes the features and benefits of your tool. Your fluency with English is not being evaluated.
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You should deploy your solution to a publicly available server (Heroku, Bluemix, Azure, AWS, etc) or provide a video with your submission. Please provide both admin access credentials to the platform and user access for your application.