February 14, 2018 The State of the Community 2018

Hi Topcoder Community! Another year has come and gone and as tradition here, we’re bringing you the State of the Community 2018 on Valentine’s Day.
2017 kicked off some big initiatives:

• We introduced new member experiences and APIs for competing in challenges
• We formally introduced tasks as part of the platform
• We launched Topcoder’s first-ever Hybrid Community
• Expert Communities were added to the platform
• We introduced support for product offerings

This year we’re focusing our efforts on you, the community, and hoping to get you engaged more than ever before. Here are a few things we’re excited for this year:

• Challenge engine evolution, meaning: improvements to Marathon Matches and the submission/review/scoring process, etc.
• A renewed focus on profiles (e.g., badges, skills, ratings, etc.)
• Beginning development on the “new Arena”
• More focus on Connect, our self-service platform, and driving customers to specific offerings that the community can deliver
• Aligning enthusiastic admins and Topcoder members to spread the word about Topcoder and help keep you excited and engaged

We are very excited about inception of the MVP program! We have some fantastic members taking on the job of being role models within our community. This group of members were selected from a large pool of nominations and we couldn’t be more pleased with the outcome. Congratulations to our first class of MVPs:

• talesforce
• thomaskranitsas
• birdofpreyru
• Nickolas
• gorbunov
• fajar.mln
• yoki
• billsedison
• gh3ablo
• CatalinT

Be sure to check out the blog post about the MVPs here.
Our expert communities have become an integral part of Topcoder and offer positive partnerships with major companies like IBM. The US Veteran’s Community, Cognitive Community, and Blockchain Community all kicked off in full force last year and will continue to grow in 2018 with more opportunities to hone new skills and earn money. We’ll also add new expert communities this year–watch for more details in the coming months!
We continue to put a lot of effort into driving opportunities and challenges into the community. Here a few key initiatives for this year. Our relationship with Wipro continues to expand as they have become a large consumer of Topcoder both internally and with their extensive customer base – this growth will continue throughout 2018!
Our partnership with IBM continues to evolve and expand with the latest being an offering to develop Chatbots on top of the Watson platform.
Work with Harvard University continues to drive both challenge activity and research for us to feed back into the platform and business model. Harvard has started a new initiative called LISH (Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard), which Topcoder will be a key partner.
Our community team is growing this year. We’re working on adding more Topcoder evangelists for each competition track as well as bringing more programs, fun challenges, learning initiatives, and opportunities to win cool stuff. Our aim is to engage you so we can help you reach your personal goals and make our community stronger.
2018 is going to be the year you can learn something new; whether it’s participating in your first marathon competition or learning how to develop Chatbots, we want to be there helping you every step of the way. From blog posts to tutorials, to live chats, and exploratory challenges, utilize all the content we have to offer to help you become a rated and paid member of this community!
The 2018 Topcoder Open is in full swing already and we’re very excited to bring you more details as they unfold. We can’t wait to bring this great event to some influential cities around the world and even a new continent. This tournament we deliver for you is one of the most important incentive programs we offer to the community. Get involved and be a part of the TCO family. So many lives have changed because of TCO; whether it’s a brand new job at a big name company or a large cash prize with a TCO trophy, the TCO can have a major impact on your life and your career also.
We look forward to a great year for the Topcoder community!