Competitions have always been an important part of the Steem community. Competitions help us discover the best of creators on Steem. They give new-comers an easier way to get noticed, it encourages creators and rewards valuable content.

1Ramp is building something cool for the contest creators, participants, and creators alike. Read more to learn about it...

For so long the community builders, creators, and enthusiasts are creating contests manually and making awesome competitions somehow work. But contests don't need to run manually forever. We believe that Steem blockchain fundamentally provides us with the building blocks to create and run online competitions.

At 1Ramp, we are building an entire system to seamlessly create and run contests right from the 1Ramp app.

There are five parts to running a contest:

1. Competition details,
2. judges,
3. prizes,
4. participants,
5. and results

We took all these elements to put together an easier and better way to create and manage contests.

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1. What's in it for the contest creators?

We collaborated with dozens of contest creators and Steemit users to figure out what they need. Then we tied those ideas together to design and develop the following features into 1Ramp.

1.1. Get a judging panel by 1Ramp for free

We on-boarded experts in Photography, Travel, Literature, Art, Design, Fashion, Film-making etc. to provide contest makers with judges.

1Ramp is collaborating with more experts in respective domains to assist contest makers in running fair and engaging contests. While creating contests on 1Ramp, you can request judges as per your needs from the given panel (and we'll take care of the rest).

Here we are revealing two judges. We'll announce more names in a separate blog post.

Domain: Literature

@sanilsachar is a national best-selling author and entrepreneur from New Delhi. The 25 year old novelist is one of the few writers in India to be published and recognised for his work in poetry, short stories, scripts, and novel. -- Wikipedia

Domain: DJ/Fashionista

Hailing from Mumbai, @thehimanisingh is an energetic soul with a passion for music and fashion. She has performed and captivated her audience nationally and internationally. Got a massive following on Instagram for her events, fashion sense, and travel photographs. -- Instagram

1.2. Create a contest in 3 steps

You don't need to write a blog (or worry about markdown or HTML tags) to announce a contest. On 1Ramp, all you need to do is follow three steps to fill up title, details, dates etc. and click publish.

It'll appear as a blog post (competition announcement) on your other Steem profiles (steemit or busy) and as a contest on 1Ramp.

1.3. Dedicated contest page

Currently, the contest creators have built a community around them and most of the participants come from that active community. One reason is that there is no better way to discover contests on other Steem platforms.

1Ramp makes your contests visible to new people on a dedicated contests page in the app. It makes contests discoverable and gives everyone a single place to find them.

1.4. Keep track of your own contests

On the competitions page, you can browse through the participant's entries, keep an eye on the important dates, and find all your closed contests. Keeping track of ongoing and closed contests will get a lot easier now.

1.5. Announce winners

At present, declaring contest results is a heck lot of work, no doubt that is the most awaited part of a contest too. Declaring winners will only take you a couple of steps on 1Ramp. After the contest ends, you can click on the 'Declare Results' in the app and give the participants respective rankings.

The app will automatically create a post by taking respective entries, links, and ranks. It will give you an editable version of a blog post (winners announcement) ready to be published.

In case you pick judges provided by 1Ramp, our community manager will collaborate with you and will walk you through the process.

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2. What's in it for the Participants?

You will never miss interesting contests on 1Ramp!

2.1. Discoverable and easy to participate

All the ongoing contests will appear on the competitions page. From there you can pick a category of your choice and find all the contest details that you need in one place.

You can open up any contest and participate in a click. It'll take you to the blog editor with the required contest details (tag, title etc.) pre-filled and all you need to do is write/upload your entry.

2.2. Get your work noticed by expert judges

For the first time on Steem, we are bringing outside experts to judge the participating entries. We'll also help them to signup on Steem. It'll benefit the entire community as more and more creators and experts join in.

Having an external jury in competitions also makes them fair, competitive, and interesting.

2.3. Keep track of the contests

On 1Ramp, you'd be able to keep track of the contests that you participated in, are ongoing or ended. Also, your entries can be found on the participant's page for a particular contest.

2.4. Discover new content creators

Browsing through the participant's entries is fun.

On other Steem based apps, you need to search for a particular hashtag and then do some mental math to look for fresh posts in a particular contest. On 1Ramp, you'd be able to explore all the entries at one place. You will also discover more creators on Steem and everyone will get more visibility in the community.

2.5. Win amazing prizes

This is a secret! 1Ramp exclusive contests will be different.

You'll stand a chance to win amazing prizes. You'll get to see it when we roll out this feature.

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3. Interested in creating contests on 1Ramp--

3.1. Get in touch

What do you expect from the competition pools? What features do you need to create or participate in contests? Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments section or write us at hi@1ramp.io or Join our discord.

Invitation 🎁

We request @travelfeed, @photofeed, @photocontests, @steemradio, @curie, @sndbox to give us your thoughts on the 'Competition Pools' feature and tell us what you need for running and managing contests on a Steem powered app. @firepower, @flamingirl, @czechglobalhosts, @cryptoctopus have been hosting engaging contests on Steem. Your feedback and ideas would help us a lot. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Note: All the usernames mentioned in this blog will get special permission to create competitions. We'll try to reach out to more contest creators but it is not possible to quickly find all the contest creators. We request that those who are interested in creating competitions should fill up this form and we'll give them special access.

3.2 Suggest us Judges

If you are interested in judging contests on 1Ramp, you may send us an email titled 'Jury @1Ramp' and include your domain of interest. Contact: hi@1ramp.io.

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Thank You @Utopian-io Community

We have been receiving great support from the Utopian-io community members. The bug reports and the feedback from community managers and testers are really helpful for our team. Thank you once again for making us part of the VIPO program.

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About 1Ramp

1Ramp is a social media for creative communities built on Steem blockchain. On 1Ramp, you can join communities of your interest, share photos, write blogs, earn rewards, and engage with fellow creators in Steem ecosystem. 1Ramp is available on Play Store.

Get it on Google Play!

What's next?

• We'll write an announcement blog when we roll out this feature in the coming weeks.
• 1Ramp's web-app is set to launch next month. We are just giving it some finishing touches.

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Join the conversation on Discord

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