Hello everybody!

As you all already know, some high profile competitions, such as GCJ and TCO have been officially discontinued and there is clearly a lack of competitive programming contests with awards for the very best performers.

Given the size of the community we have here on Codeforces and on other places too, I think we can use our expertise and our networking to create a new series of competitions (and possibly in the future an organization to help competitive programming grow worldwide) to make up and even pass the existent competitions in prestige and awards. After all, the platform which will be used won't even matter that much, as I see it as a team effort to bring competitive programming to a higher standard in terms of prizes in competition.

For example, Codeforces got $125k when people donated for the 10 year badge, which is a lot of money used for expenses such as keeping the servers up, paying problem setters and paying the employees, among others. In my opinion, such a sum of money could help the community run a series of more highly respected competitions to award the best performers for a few years, while also helping communities grow.

Even though there is an economic downturn going on, I'm sure there would be a lot of interested firms in donating even sums such as $1k or even $500, plus as I showed with the Codeforces donations, a lot of individual donors. It doesn't take a lot of donations to at least make up for what was lost as a consequence of losing GCJ and TCO on a yearly basis.

Also, if competitive programming turns out to be more and more popular (that might require some format changes IMO), the income streams would also grow and this could only turn out to be more beneficial for the entire community.

I am aware this would mean a lot of organizing work and this is why I believe working as a team would help us achieve this goal, assuming it is something the community wants.

What do you all think about this idea? Do you think it has any potential to succeed?

Let's have a debate on that and if things go well, maybe even start a conversation in a more organized way to get things going.