ChallengePost

Introduction

We welcome your participation in Challenge.gov. Challenge.gov is an official U.S. Federal Government website that the public can use to come together to tackle challenges posed by the government. You can participate in a number of ways, including creating an account, submitting a submission to a challenge, or engaging in a forum-style discussion.

To ensure that you have a productive and welcoming experience at Challenge.gov, the federal agencies that sponsor challenges on this site may moderate this content—in other words, review it before or after it is posted on the site. This document explains what guidelines are used in reviewing the content you submit. Although each individual challenge has its own rules about eligibility and participation, this document provides you with a baseline “rules of the road” that you can use to ensure that your participation is appropriate and that all get the most out of Challenge.gov.

Who Can Participate in Challenge.gov

This website is open to the public. On this site, you can:

  • Browse and search for government challenges
  • Submit submissions or entries in response to government challenges
  • “Support” challenges and spread the word to your networks
  • Engage in forum-style discussions associated with individual challenges
  • Vote on submissions or entries (if enabled by that particular challenge)

Any member of the public can view all public-facing content on the site without creating a ChallengePost account. However, you must create an account—become a registered user—before you can contribute any content to the site. Your participation in this site is voluntary, and no payments or gifts will be made to respondents other than payments or items promised as a result of winning a government challenge. Any content you submit is in the public domain and may be reused, except where governed by the individual Intellectual Property rules of individual challenges.

Your Public Identity

When you register with the site, you can create a username. This is an online “alias” that need not reflect your actual identity (e.g., “Bev at GSA,” “SuperUser84” or “ChallengeSolvingLady”). You can choose any username you want, but usernames are subject to the rules outlined in “Standards of Conduct” below. Users who create usernames that violate this standard of conduct may be asked to choose a new username, or else have their accounts suspended.

If you choose not to create a username, you will be represented on the site using your first name and the first letter of your last name—so, for example, John Thompson would be represented on the site as “John T”. Any time you make a comment, support a challenge, or enter a submission, that action will be associated with your Challenge.gov public alias. You can edit your profile, including your user name, at any time.

Standards of Conduct

Federal agency personnel administering Challenge.gov use the terms below to review the content you post to the site. In some cases, an agency may decide to pre-moderate (review) before posting discussion comments associated with a challenge. This may result in a delay between you submitting your comment and it appearing on the site. All challenge entries (submissions) will be reviewed prior to posting, to determine if they meet the eligibility requirements of the specific challenge as well as the standards of conduct.

Any material submitted to the site may be removed if it includes any of the following:

  • Threatening, slanderous or obscene language
  • Personal attacks
  • Discriminatory language (including hate speech) based on race, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, religion or disability
  • Sexually explicit material or other material that would violate the law if published here
  • Ideas or comments that promote services or products, unless submitted in the context of a submission to a relevant challenge
  • Repetitive posts (for example, if you submit the same submission or comments multiple times to a single challenge)
  • Spam or undecipherable language (gratuitous links will be viewed as spam)
  • Proprietary information that you do not hold the right to make public
  • Entries submitted to which the submitter cannot plausibly hold the copyright or other intellectual property rights
  • Personally Identifiable Information (e.g., social security numbers, postal and email addresses, phone numbers)

These guidelines provide a baseline for reviewing your participation on Challenge.gov; each agency may decide on a case-by-case basis whether individual pieces of content warrant removal from the site. If you find that your content has been removed from the site, please feel free to re-submit it without the offending content. Please be aware that in many cases, submissions submitted in response to challenges that are deemed ineligible by the rules of the specific challenge will not be displayed publicly.

To read more about how we handle the content you submit, please see our privacy policy.

Public Voting

Agencies hosting challenges on Challenge.gov may choose to include a public voting component, in which users can vote on eligible submissions. You can only vote for, not against, submissions. You can vote on as many submissions as you’d like, only once per submission. These votes will not necessarily determine the winner of a challenge; you should consult the rules of individual challenges to see how they are used. (For example, many challenges feature a “People’s Choice” winner that is separate from other prizes in the challenge.) You should never enter a vote that is coerced or paid for.

By submitting a submission to a contest that has a public voting component, you agree that your submission may be subjected to public voting, and that the results of that voting may be associated publicly with your submission.

Questions about these Terms

These Terms of Participation may be amended or modified in the future. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at challenge@gsa.gov.