The Science Museum is holding a competition to release hundreds of stories from our recently opened Cosmos & Culture exhibition on to the web.
Email us by midnight on November 28 (GMT) - you don't need to pre-register.
Two prizes of £1000 are offered: 'best website for adult audiences', 'best website for audiences aged 11 - 16'.
Competition winners will be credited on the Science Museum website and on the winning sites as appropriate.
You don't have to make a complete site, just a section of a site. The idea is to create something that does one thing, and does it well. Read more in this blogpost. This might mean producing a mashup for one particular way of exploring the objects, or exploring a sub-set of the objects. It’d then be up to us to combine the winning mashups into a larger site that works for our audiences.
Submissions are due at midnight (London time) on November 28, 2009.
We aim to have the winning websites live and available to the public by mid-December.
Judges
Christian Heilmann
A geek and hacker at heart, Christian Heilmann has been a professional web developer for about eleven years. He has been nominated "standards champion of the year 2008" by .net magazine in the UK and he currently sports the fashionable job title "International Developer Evangelist" spending his time speaking and training people on systems provided by Yahoo and other web companies that want to make this web thing work well for everybody.
Chris Lintott
Chris Lintott is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. His research looks at the analysis of star formation, including being principal investigator for the Galaxy Zoo project. He is also co-presenter on the Sky at Night program alongside Sir Patrick Moore.
Submissions
To submit an entry, send an email to web.team@sciencemuseum.org.uk with the subject line ‘Cosmic Collections entry’ and the following information:
- Link to working version of your site
- Link to code on a repository (github, sourceforge, etc) or zipped file online. Your code should be documented enough that it's possible for another developer to figure out how it works and get it up and running again if it falls over. Document any workarounds for e.g. shared hosts, particular platforms, etc. A readme and inline documentation is sufficient at the point of submission
- The names, location and contact details of your team members.
- Tell us which group of users (kids aged 11 – 16; adults) it’s aimed at. If you’ve got more precisely defined users in mind, tell us about them.
If your submission wins, or is a runner-up, we’ll get in contact to discuss any intellectual property or licensing issues as well as how you’d like to be credited. We’d love it if you want to participate in any publicity (blog interview, press, whatever), but it’s not a prerequisite.
You can enter as many times as you like. If your entry isn't entirely perfect by the deadline, submit it anyway with a note about those last bugs you haven't yet squashed.
