UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

Challenge Proposal

Challenge participation is open for everyone, however, to initiate a challenge not everyone is eligible. This does not mean that single entities cannot approach eligible parties to help set up a challenge. Eligible parties are, but not limited to:

• United Nations departments and offices
• United Nations agencies and programs
• United Nations Member States
• Non-Governmental Organisation (NGOs)
• Private Sector Companies

If you are not one of the five eligible parties, or doubt about your eligibility to initiate a challenge, please feel free to email us at uniteideas@un.org

Every challenge should meet certain criteria, which are the same for every party wanting to initiate a challenge. There are four main criteria:

1. The topic of the challenge must be related to one or multiple of the UN mandates, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, Human Right or Peace and Security.
2. The challenge has to have a positive influence of a large group of people, communities or countries, meaning the challenges need to be relevant and applicable to real life issues.
3. All outcomes should be based on Open Source technologies, ensuring access to every interested party, creating more equal accessibility to high end technological solutions to real life issues.
4. The challenge organiser must be able to take on the responsibilities listed under the ‘roles and responsibilities’ section. If a challenge organiser is unable to ensure its capability of this the challenge cannot be launched.

At the ‘Submit a challenge’ section, you can fill out the form and start your challenge proposal.

Both the challenge organiser and the Unite Ideas team have responsibilities and clearly defined roles in preparation of the challenge and during the challenge.

The Unite Ideas team has a largely advisory role throughout the challenge and is mainly focussed on the Unite Ideas platform, and not the challenge itself. Each challenge will have one dedicated contact person from the Unite Ideas team, who will be available for questions and will help guide the challenge, but is not the end responsible, nor will this person have an organising role. The Unite Ideas team will also help with the promotions of the challenge through own channels as well as other United Nations channels.

The challenge organiser is the primary owner of the challenge and is responsible for the organisation, promotion, and moderating. The following responsibilities must be carried out by the challenge organiser:

• Appointing challenge focal points, which have been outlined in the challenge topic and must be clear to participants to ensure the best possible outcomes.
• Challenge formulation, which is the main information provided to the participants and will have to fulfill the three first point in the ‘What are the criteria’ section.
• The challenge organiser should provide data sets and other background material for the challenge, however, the material used by participants does not have to be limited to what is provided. Nonetheless, the material and data provided should be enough to give a workable basis for the challenge.
• Appoint the review panel, the organiser is responsible for the review panel. Please look at previous challenges to find out who are usually involved in reviewing the submissions.
• Coordinate the prizes for the winning submissions.
• Actively promote the challenge, which includes providing the graphics and materials used to promote the challenge.
• Monitor the submitted ideas and moderate the discussions on the Unite Ideas Platform. The organiser is responsible for the smooth operation of the challenge, whereby monitoring and moderating are of key importance, it is therefore advised to have one or two people available throughout the challenge to continually monitor and moderate.

The Unite Ideas team will help to assist wherever it can, during both the preparation and when the challenge is live. If you have any questions about the responsibilities or want to know if the Unite Ideas team can help you with a specific responsibility, please contact us at uniteideas@un.org.

How does it work?