About OpenChallenges

The centralized hub for all challenges biomedical and more.

The Challenge experience is currently cumbersome for all stakeholders involved. Participants encounter a huge pain-point in discovering Challenges they are interested in, while Organizers struggle to find a streamlined solution to reaching a wide audience.

OpenChallenges (OC) strives to address some of the friction in the Challenge experience by providing a centralized hub to reduce participant search cost and increasing Challenge visibility. Think of OpenChallenges like an EventBrite for the scientific benchmarking space!

Background

Sage Bionetworks strives to bridge the translational divide between biomedical research and clinical application by embracing open and reusable practices. One example is hosting scientific Challenges, galvanizing large communities of experts around new and complex biomedical problems. Aside from crowdsourcing biomedical problems, Challenges also seek to enable the robust assessment of tool performance (Ellrott, K., Buchanan, A., Creason, A. et al.)

When done right, Challenges encourage innovation by promoting friendly competition to develop the best algorithms, evaluation with objective frameworks for assessment of these algorithms, and collaboration by bringing together new teams to uncover new insights. The Challenges ecosystem, however, is bottlenecked by the lack of a hub centralizing all biomedical challenges. Participants encounter a huge pain-point in discovering Challenges they are interested in, while Organizers struggle to find a streamlined solution to reaching a wide audience.

Goals

Make challenges more discoverable

Standardize information about Challenges
Create a community hub

Empower professional identity

Help organizers drive thought, leadership, and awareness
Support participants with their professional development journeys

Increase challenge intelligence

Create OC user profiles to enable challenge intelligence
Require registered OC users to go through an onboarding flow