The OpenNTF Alliance wants to organize development contests for applications based on XPages. In order to motivate developers we're looking for corporate sponsors.

Through the contests we're trying to achieve a couple of goals. Most importantly, we'd like to extend the reach of OpenNTF.org and XPages to get more developers interested in XPages app development. With the free Domino Designer and the XPages.info site as starting page, lots of samples on OpenNTF.org, development machine images on Amazon and the IBM cloud, we believe that XPages has momentum with developers around the world. In order to truly reach new and existing developers, especially younger developers, we'd like to host these development contests on a regular basis.

Another goal of the contests is to increase the number of open source contributions to OpenNTF. All contest entrants will need to have signed and executed OpenNTF contributor agreements. Their apps will also need to go through the OpenNTF IP process. Last but not least we want to share with others the true power and flexibility of XPages.

The OpenNTF Alliance will be responsible for all of the work to host the contests. This includes the definition of the rules, implementation of the process, judging, publications, marketing activities, etc. We'll use a similar process as we have in the past for the Lotus Awards. For these awards all of the judging will be done by OpenNTF.

The corporate sponsor of a contest can but does not have to determine the theme of a contest and/or the types of contributions that are expected. For example, a sponsor who wants to provide solutions for charting might want to host a contest with a theme 'charting of NSF data'.

In addition to the ability to define the contest's theme and participate in judging, the corporate sponsor will be mentioned including company logo in the (future) landing page of the contests, in all announcement blog entries and blog entries describing the three winners. In 2010 the OpenNTF website was visited more than 3.5 million times and more than 150.000 releases were downloaded.

We'd like to have three winners for each contest held. In order to motivate people we'd like to provide awards, for example three tablets for the three winners. Sponsorship is $2,500 per contest. This money will be used solely for the contest awards and shipping and not for the organization of the contests.

Contact adsales@openntf.org if you are interested in sponsoring development contests on OpenNTF.

We'd also like to get some feedback from the OpenNTF community regarding the contest. What do you think about the general concept? Would you participate? If not, what would have to change?

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