Dan said:Bas said:*snip*On the contest front, I'm normally the guy to say that this is a bad idea, given how many contests that Microsoft runs (avg 1/week). I won't repeat the rant on my blog on this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/danielfe/archive/2008/03/17/microsoft-the-contest-machine.aspx, but you'd be surprised by how little participation some of these contests get. Further, for a community like C9, I think collaboration instead of competition would be a better option.
On the collaboration front, one of the things Clint and I were discussing for Coding4Fun was to have sponsored open source projects. So a dev team would submit an idea for a useful app or library, and if they get approved, we fund them to develop their idea. That way, you get folks collaborating on an open source project, the output of the project is open source and designed for reuse and even devs not participating can benefit from using your library. Google does something similar with their Summer of Code for example. Thoughts on that versus a contest?
When I said contest, I was actually referring to some sort of C9 sponsored code event. Code collaboration sounds like a great idea.
Maybe have it problem driven, like find a particular realworld issue someone on some site raised ("I wish I could keep track of my daily calorie intake by scanning in the wrappers from foods I eat" or "I wonder if there's a correlation between W3bbo's hair length and the amount of humor in his posts.").
The projects would have to be at that level interesting.
Or, we could even collaborate on C9 features. 
