[vox] ACM programming contest

[Bill Broadley]

On 11/11/2010 08:00 PM, Bill Ward wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Bill Broadley <bill at broadley.org> wrote:
>
> I'd rather have the contest entries prove useful beyond the contest itself.
> You don't want a dozen programs that all do the same thing do you?  Wouldn't
> you rather have about a dozen innovative, different tools that all do
> something different and useful?

Programming contests don't typically produce anything useful.  Not sure
how much I'd expect from a few man hours or a man-week.  If you have an
itch that needs scratched and want to write a useful program go for it.
 I'd just be surprised if a Davis Linux User group is going to inspire a
dozen new apps.

The only exception I can thing of was the early android contests that
had a huge budget.  Wasn't it $250k with $50k or $100k for first place?

Seems kinda hard to run a contest without a central purpose.  If you
don't pick what the goal is how do you keep people from just using
something they have already written?

Do you want to say something like best new app by Jan 1st gets voted on
at the next meeting?