There are several communication pathways available for you within the Grand Challenge platform. These vary, depending on whether you are an organizer or a participant of a challenge.

Receiving Emails from Grand Challenge¶

We recommend you enable a forum for your challenge. You can use this forum to make announcements to all participants, and participants can use it to ask general questions that are useful for every one to see and learn from. By default both the challenge organizers and the participants will be subscribed to the challenge forum. Creating a forum post will generate a notification for subscribed users. Whether a user will also receive an email about this depends on their notification settings: A user may receive emails instantly on new notifications (or direct messages), or they could opt to receive a daily summary of unread notifications or opt out of email notifications entirely. You can change your notification preferences in your profile settings.

Organizers ➡️ Participants¶

Forum Posts and Announcements¶

Forum posts and announcements are a great way to reach all of your participants at once. To make a post or announcement, create a new forum topic. Under 'Post topic as', you can choose between making a standard 'Post' or an 'Announcement'. Participants are notified for both of these, but announcements will be highlighted in their notifications and also appear first in the forum for better visibility.

Direct Messaging¶

You can send direct messages to the participants of your challenge. To start a new message thread with a participant, navigate to the 'Admin' menu in your challenge and go to the 'Participants' tab and click the 'Message User' button. You can also find this button on each evaluation's detail page, in the Evaluation Admin section. Pressing the button will start a new thread with the user if this is the first time you are messaging the user, otherwise, it will take you to the existing conversation.

Participants ➡️ Organizers¶

Email¶

On the homepage of your challenge, the participants can find the following button. The target email depends on the 'Contact email' setting within in your challenge.

⚠️ Challenge organisers should pay attention to their inbox!

Forum Post¶

Enabling the forum allows participants to ask questions about their submissions or other problems they face. In contrast to private emails, this open forum has the benefit that other participants can read these questions and your answers to them, hopefully reducing the question load for you as an admin.