Call for articles in Technical Blogging Competition, LOCUS 2015

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Update: This competition has already ended.

Update: Read all LOCUS 2015 competition Entries here.[/note]

LOCUS 2015: On the occasion of 12th edition of National Technological Festival, LOCUS 2015 is organizing a “Technical Blogging Competition” in association with Team TechSansar and National Technology Research Center (NTRC). Locus 2015 will be held during February 20 to 22, 2015 (Falgun 8-10, 2072) – read event detail here.

All techies, students and tech-enthusiasts are invited to participate in this Technical Blogging Competition where in they have to submit their blog posts expressing the theme of the program LOCUS 2015, detail guidelines being provided below. The competition is open now!

Article Topics & Submission

Technical articles or blog posts submitted for the competition should be allied to one of the following 3 topics;

1. ICT for Development (ICT4D) – where do we Nepalese stand & possibilities
2. Technology for Future – technology as a change agent
3. Practical e-Government scenario – present and future possibilities in context of Nepal

Only those articles meeting the following requirements are accepted for the competition and published in the website for evaluation:

1. Maximum article title length of up to 60 characters including space
2. Article extract (for meta-description) up to 156 characters including space
3. Article summary (one paragraph) in about 30-50 words
4. Article length of minimum 565 words
5. Maximum of 5 article keywords
6. At least one graphical or image representation contextual to the article

Articles can be submitted individually or in a group. Participants can submit more than one article to the competition.

Articles should be submitted online via http://bit.ly/LOCUS2015, after an initial screening they will be published online for competition within 12 hours on TechSansar.com.

Selecting Winners

Total of 4 winners – 3 being the competition winners first, second and third; and one surprise winner will be selected from the participants whose article is published in the website for public viewing. The criteria to select the first three-winners depend on three different evaluation parameters as following;

Parameter	Weightage	Remarks
Article viewsI	50%	Quantitative measure. Higher the views, greater the weightage obtained. Value computed relative to all published articles.
Article shareII	20%	Quantitative measure. Higher the share, greater the weightage obtained. Value computed relative to all published articles.
Article relevancy	30%	Qualitative measure. Marked by the organizing team.

The surprise winner is selected from a computer program based on randomness by random.org. For surprise winner, all articles that are published are eligible.

Prize for the competition participants

The prize distribution for the winning participants – in total of 4 different prizes are distributed at the official closing of the LOCUS 2015 event by the organizers. The prizes are distributed as following arrangement;

Category	Prize	Remarks
First Winner	NPR 5,000	Can be redeemed for IEEE student membership 2015/16
Second Winner	NPR 3,000
Third Winner	NPR 1,000
Surprise Winner	One year of premium cloud-based web hosting+

All participants get an opportunity to co-author⁺⁺ a research paper for publication in an international peer-reviewed journal. In case, there are no any claims after one week of the announcement, prizes are to be returned to NTRC.

Notations

^I Article views is defined according to the Google Analytics terms and condition; 30 minute session per computer IP address is the standard adopted in the publishing platform. Views generated till 12 PM the day of official closing is counted. Computerized, robotic views are automatically discarded. Posting of the article in any irrelevant website (including purchased PPC/V) solely for the purpose of increasing views will jeopardize the total view count for that article.

^II Only the social platform buttons available in each article are entertained and counted for the weightage. Only views generated till 12 PM the day of official closing is counted.

⁺ Premium web-hosting account based on cloud based server for one year from the day of winner announcement, includes premium DNS, FTP access, Web space of 50GB, and a remote-accessible MySQL database. Hosting account utilization is subject to agreement, and terms and conditions of the cloud service provider.

⁺⁺ Participants can request to co-author in one of various research topics undertaken by NTRC.

 Proceed to participate in the competition!