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Hosting a Data Challenge on Wildfire Commons

This page offers guidelines for scientists, educators, and policymakers interested in hosting data challenges through Wildfire Commons.

Preparing Your Challenge

Before creating your challenge on Wildfire Commons, ensure you have the following information and steps completed:

Obtain Educator Credentials

Hosting data challenges is restricted to collaborators with educator credentials. To obtain these credentials, contact us to make your request.

Explore Catalog / Register Your Data

The data for your challenge must be available through the Community Catalog. You can either use existing data or register your data.

Prepare Your Workspaces

Workpsaces are hands-on resources for participants working on Wildfire Commons. Before publishing your challenge, ensure all relevant workspaces are included. These workspaces can include:

  • A supporting workspace to train participants on interacting with datasets or models.
  • A base solution for the challenge.
  • A base workspace to facilitate team workflow development.

It is essential to test workspaces before publication to ensure they function correctly and specify the resources participants need to reserve when working on JupyterHub.

Learn more about workspaces in this section

Setting Up Your Challenge

1- Go to Data Challenges --> My Data Challenges. Make sure to request your educator credentials in advance so you can create a Data Challenge

2- Click on New Data Challenge.

3- Provide the initial data challenge information.

  • Title of the Data Challenge
  • Hosting Institution
  • Contact Information: For participant questions or concerns.
  • Start and End Dates Make sure that all the required initial fields are filled out before clicking on Set Up Data Challenge. You can edit the challenge later if you need to make changes.

4- Complete the main data challenge information:

  • Goal: A concise statement describing the main objective of the challenge (e.g., Develop a new segmentation model for burn scar detection). This goal should captivate interest and succinctly present the problem to be addressed.
  • Background: Provide context and information that led to the creation of the challenge.
  • Challenge Description: Offer a detailed description of the challenge, including stages, workspace usage, and expected outputs.
  • Rules: Specify all rules, such as eligibility, platform usage guidelines, and disqualifying actions.
  • Prize: If applicable, include prize details for display on the Explore page.
  • FAQ: Add potential Frequently Asked Questions.
  • Dataset Details: Provide an overview of the data to be used in the challenge and any additional information not included in the catalog entry.

Ensure the relevant data is registered in the data catalog and accessible through a workspace.

To save a draft, click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. This will save your draft and open a preview of the challenge. To edit again, click the Edit button in the top right corner of the challenge.

5- Add Workspaces:

  • Click Edit next to modules to start adding modules to your challenge
  • Ensure that the challenge description clearly outlines the workspace workflow. You can also edit the order in which your modules are displayed.

6- Add a Curated Catalog:

  • To make the data sources for the challenge more accessible, you can create a curated catalog and add it to the challenge by clicking Add in the Curated Catalog section.

7- Activate your Data Challenge:

  • Once your data challenge is ready, click Save Changes to save your changes and Activate to activate it. The Activate button is located in the top right corner of the Data Challenge.

  • Once you activate your challenge, it will be publicly available, and any Wilfire Commons user will be able to join. You can still make changes.

Adding Admins and Evaluators

Within a Data Challenge, you can assign two roles:

  • Admins — Have full control over the challenge, including making edits, adding workspaces and curated catalogs, and managing all other challenge functions.
  • Evaluators — Have view-only access to the challenge, intended for evaluation and scoring purposes.

To add these roles to your challenge:

  1. Make sure your intended users are registered in Wildfire Commons.
  2. From the challenge's preview view (not edit mode), go to the Teams tab.
  3. Click Add members under the group (Admins or Evaluators) to which you want to add users.
  4. Enter the email addresses of the users you want to add.