-is-this-fft-'s blog

By -is-this-fft-, history, 18 months ago, In English

Hi everyone!

After a successful camp in February, we are excited to announce that Osijek camp will be returning this September. Precise dates and registration details will be announced later, but for now, we are looking for contests and problemsetters.

To apply, contact us at ocpc (at) mathos (dot) hr or contact me (-is-this-fft-) or adamant directly. Specific compensation might depend on how successful we are with sponsors and participation fees. As a reference point, last time, we offered 2000€ per contest. Note that the compensation is subject to Croatian income tax (around 25%).

You don't need to have enough ideas for a full problemset yet, but you should have a somewhat good idea of what your contest is going to be, i.e. you should have at least 6-7 problem ideas already. The most important criterion for us is whether your contest fits the camp in terms of style and difficulty. The camp is aimed at the highest level of competition, thus the difficulty should be comparable or harder than typical ICPC regional contests. However, it is good if the difficulty distribution between problems is spread out: do not hesitate to add a few very easy or super-hard problems.

Any specific deadlines and things you would want me to do?

We would expect the problem set to be finalized in terms of problem ideas a month before that, and be mostly ready (prepared on Polygon) around a week before the camp. We will also expect that you present a tutorial after the contest, or make a PDF doc or presentation with some written details, so that we can explain it to participants. We will likely accept contest proposals on first come, first served basis, so it's better to confirm your commitment as soon as you're sure that you want to set a contest.

Can I propose a contest if I am also a camp participant?

Yes, absolutely! In fact, we encourage you to. If you are a camp participant and prepare a contest, your team will not participate on that day, but will otherwise take part in the camp normally. We will also charge no admission fee from your team if you author a contest.

What if I have some interesting ideas, but no time to prepare them?

We recommend you to find a co-author for your contest, who may help you with preparation. Feel free to reach out to us, we can discuss some options. Please bear in mind that since a significant part of the work involved in authoring a contest is preparing the tests, the compensation might be reduced for such proposals.

Can I re-use problems or contests that appeared somewhere else before?

Generally, we prefer problems that are original, or have very little public exposure. In principle, we can still consider your contest if it has some problems from low profile local or private competitions that already happened, but we would need to minimize the possibility that our participants were exposed to them. We might also reduce the compensation for the contest, if you already was compensated for it before.

Can I re-use the problems after I used them in the camp?

We recognize that it is natural for an author to desire for greater exposure for their problems, and we believe that it is a nice thing to give back to the community by making the contests more accessible. As such, we do not want to restrict you from re-using or publishing your problems after the camp has concluded.

However, based on the feedback from the previous camp, we will have a "silence period" after the camp, during which camp materials won't be released to the public. Thus, we ask you to refrain from publishing the problems at least until the end of November 2023.

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