In the good old times, I really enjoyed participating in Carl Mäsak's Perl 6 Coding Contest.
I'd like to revive this kind of contest, with a few small modifications.
Since running such a contest is a lot of work, I'd like to crowd-source parts of it. This is my idea of how it could work.
- People can volunteer to be part of the group that crowd-sources the tasks. Of course, task creators cannot participate in the actual contest.
- In parallel, we work on criteria to evaluate the submitted code. This can be a public discussion.
- We (if nobody else does, I) announce the contest, the tasks and the deadlines.
- After submission deadlines, all submissions are published.
- There is a public commenting phase, in which we prompt everybody to respectfully comment on both positive and negative features of the code.
- Based on the comments and my own opinions, I will award prizes to whom I consider the winners. (This is mostly to not provide incentives for participants to game the comment/rating phase). I will also encourage others to pledge their own prizes, and either award them independently, or delegate the awarding to somebody else.
What do you all think?
(If it turns out to fit, we could try to correlate this with the Diwali release of Perl 6).
Maybe we should do it instead of the squashathon, for example in December.