- The event will start on 2023-10-28 00:01 UTC.

- The event will end on 2023-10-29 23:59 UTC.

- Registration will close 5 days prior to the start date.

- Each team will have exactly 48 hours (plus 2 minutes) to work on their projects.

- The jury will have a month to evaluate all the submissions (this might take longer, as it's voluntary work).

- Team size is 1 to 4.

- Every team member has to be an individual, not an organization.

- All members of a team should be at least 18 years old.

- Judges of this contest cannot participate in it as members of a team.

- Organisers of this contest cannot participate in it as members of a team.

- Every team has to register by completing the registration form.

- Each team shall have a designated leader to handle the prize distribution among its members as well as communicating with the organizers. A team's decision on forfeiting a prize is a private one and the organization will not get involved with that.

- This player must log into our private Erlang Ecosystem Foundation Slack channel (#spawnfest-[year]) for communicating with the organisation during the contest. This is done by invitation-only.

- Player's (identified by e-mail and/or GitHub profile) cannot be part of more than one team.

- All projects should be written to run on the Erlang VM / BEAM, and any BEAM-based language is valid (e.g., Erlang, Elixir, LFE, Gleam, Clojerl, Luerl, Caramel, etc.).

- Supplementary languages such as Javascript (and JS frameworks), Rust, Elm, Go, etc., are allowed.

- Only code created after the start of the contest will be evaluated by the judges.

- The system may include code that was written before the start of the contest, as long as the division between that code and the new one is made perfectly clear for the judges to see.

- Each team should come up with their own project idea, or alternatively use one from our list of project ideas.

- The organizing team will create a public GitHub repository for each team.

- The name of this GitHub repository cannot be changed.

- All deliverables should be uploaded to the repository, which shall be used by the jury to evaluate the projects.

- Suggested extra deliverables to include: documentation, comprehensive README.md, project-related art (e.g. logos), tests and anything that makes building and understanding the system easier for the judges.

- Contributions to the project (e.g. Pull Requests) from developers outside the team will be forbidden during the contest, but encouraged afterwards.

- Usage of third party libraries and web services is not prohibited, it's even encouraged.

- Ownership and Copyright: each team retains all the rights to their submissions and the repository transfership can always be requested. Note, however, that you will only keep write access to the repository until 5 months before the next edition of SpawnFest.

- User Privacy: projects shall not collect any type of personally identifiable information.

- Lawful submissions only: please do not submit anything that can be considered harmful, unlawful or both.

- Players will not be able to write to their GitHub repositories while their submissions are being evaluated.

- Accepting the organization's GitHub invitation to join a team is compulsory until the moment the contest starts; failing to do so means we consider you won't be joining the contest.

- Your work will be judged by a publicly known jury, unless your team is previously disqualified.

- Each project will be evaluated in 6 different categories: Creativity, Usefulness, Innovation, Correctness, Maintainability and Completion.

- Final interpretation of each category meaning is up to the judges, but as general guidelines:

Creativity

This category assigns points for unexpectedness, eccentricity, fun. This is a broad category that may apply to the project, its code, the team, etc.

Usefulness

How useful the project will be for its target users. Does it solve an existing problem? Does it significantly reduce work time for its users?

Innovation

How groundbreaking the project is. The more unique and unprecedented the idea behind the project, the better. Also applies to projects developed in a unique way.

Correctness

The less bugs, the better. This category values working products over complete ones.

Maintainability

How easy will it be for future developers to keep contributing to this project after SpawnFest is over.

Completion

Is the project functional? Did the team get to a point where there is something to show, even if there are a few bugs here and there?

- The final score of each team will be computed as the sum of the points received in all those categories. The team with the highest final score (in a non-specific bracket) will be the overall winner of the contest.

- As long as there are more prizes, those might be awarded to runner-up teams, or bracket-specific teams.

- Prizes gifted from sponsors shall be distributed among all winning teams and players at the organizer's discretion. For example, if Acme, Inc. puts up a 1 million USD Amazon gift card, the organizers may award the overall winner 500,000 USD Amazon gift and split up the remaining value among other winning teams and players.

- Each sponsor is responsible for delivering the prize they provided to the winning teams, after the organization has attributed them.

- Individual participants or even entire teams can be disqualified if they don't abide by these rules, or other types of behaviour that the organizers might find unacceptable. The organizers reserve the right to apply the punishment they consider fit to any transgression.

- Event organizers will not reimburse you for any expenses or losses.

- Event organizers are not responsible for any damage, legal actions or any other outcomes that might be a result of your participation.

- Event organizers reserve the right to change these rules without prior notification, up until 5 days before the event starts.