The Contributors Competition aims to reward the members who contribute the most to the Data Science Foundation website by helping to raise their profile.

The competition is based on Contributor Points, which are a combination of points awarded for publishing material and points received from other members though post ratings. The winner is the person who has accrued the most points during the competition period.

The winner of the monthly competition will have a 'Winners Badge' added to their Personal Profile page and will receive a cash prize of £100 paid by PayPal transfer. Two runners-up will receive prizes for second and third place of £50 and £25 respectively. Note that cash prizes are only paid to Individual and Associate members, not to organisational members and only after the minimum point threshold has been reached.

How Contributor Points are Calculated

When a member posts an item to the Data Science Foundation website, they receive the following points:

• Whitepaper 50
• Use Case 20 
• DataTalk Post 10 
• Open Forum Thread 5 
• Add comment to open Forum Discussion 1 
• Submit News Item 1 
• Rate another member's Paper 1
• Like a Use Case or an Article of another member 1

The review process can take up to three days and sometimes longer for white papers. The item will be dated as the day it is submitted, not the day published.

Articles and Use Cases Likes

Contributor Points are awarded when members Like Articles and Use Cases. Liking an item will add 3 Contributor Points to the author’s total. Members can only Like an item once.

Whitepaper Rating Points

When a member rates a Whitepaper, the total value of the rating is added to the contributor’s points total. The member can choose to award a rating of between 1 – 10. Members can only rate an item once.

Note that submitting an item does not guarantee that it will be published. We pay attention to the quality of the writing as well as the quality of the content. If an item is rejected, you will receive an explanation as to why it has been rejected.

Whitepapers should be at least 2500 words in length and be authoritative documents based on your expertise and research. They should be formatted to include an abstract, keywords, an introduction to your argument or topic and conclusions or recommendations.

All items submitted for publication must be your original work or be produced by your organisation and you must have copyright permission to publish them on the Data Science Foundation website. Any work or research produced by others must clearly referenced

Note that editors may make minor corrections to work where the correction does not have any material impact. These might include spelling corrections, grammatical changes or inserting missing words.