New Update: Appeal period

Dearest Participants of UNI,

Hoping all is well. 

We are here to announce a small tweak that we are bringing to the evaluation process - called an "Appeal period".

This became a necessary course of action after receiving a few reports that certain entries violated competition ground rules (like height, setbacks, ground coverage) and still advanced to shortlisting phase. 

Context: As a platform, we witness a lot of exceptional work coming into the competitions curated by us, and we have deep empathy with our participants who put in extraordinary effort to make this happen. This empathy also exists because of our wholehearted effort to make this one-of-a-kind design repository of the world, and we appreciate every contribution that comes our way big or small. 

When we are making our primary review after a competition ends for basic compliances, we see some breaches (major/minor) when the review panel checks incoming projects based on the competition brief - especially some site-related conditions. The review panel is gentle with the projects not only because of the above mindset we share with them; but mainly because these are concept-based competitions and some up-and-downs (accidentally/intentionally) may happen. This is true especially when we are launching some challenging/realistic design problems with specific conditions. Eg. Container City. 

But this leniency causes more harm than good at times creating un-even ground for especially participants who abide by these rules. Being a competition-centric design community; fair competition is the north star we follow regardless of what comes our way. 

Change: Hence, to fix this we are bringing in a new update to our evaluation process called the appeal period. This will help participants report any entry for significant anomalies which they can report directly to the competition control. 

The scope of this appeal period is - 7-10 days after the submissions are over kept aside for reviewing the submissions by the entire participating entries. (You can check this in the schedule period)

Eligibility: Only participants who are submitting in the competition, are entitled to make appeals for the projects they are peer-reviewing. Registered participants who are not submitting in a competition cannot file appeals. To keep it reserved for only competitions that need this change are considered based on projects received. The feature opens automatically if the entries received are more than 30. We send newsletters to all the participants to notify about this active duration before we move ahead. 

How to send an appeal: The appeals can be sent as an email to competition control of UNI at this email: competitioncontrol@uni.xyz - with the subject line - Appeal: - Project title. The appeal is kept confidential and not revealed to other participants. 

Action: Once an appeal is submitted, we forward this to our preliminary review committee who review the project first by themselves, then review the list of appeals sent by eligible participants of the competition. We can take two kinds of actions for the appeal:

1. Reversible breach: These are small mistakes like a revelation of name or personal identities, not adding team members, participating via organization accounts, etc. 

2. Irreversible breach: This includes misconduct like violating site boundaries, site location, height restrictions, some special conditions which are specific to brief, etc. 

For Reversible breach, we connect with the participants to make some quick changes and bring their projects to the eligible pool of entries. This may happen because of language barriers/unfamiliarity with the fine print. These are unknowingly done mistakes and can be fixed to ensure we invite as many as possible for a fair evaluation. 

An irreversible breach is a call that competition control takes based on its review or an appeal made by a participant - putting the project next to the competition brief and understanding the root cause or nature of the error. While we try to bring the project back into a fair evaluation zone, sometimes the errors/violations are so huge it's very tough to bring some projects back. In such cases, we follow the disqualification policy of UNI. 

What it is not: Appeal policy is not aimed to breed hatred and prejudice between participants, hence please do not report projects out of personal grudge. This includes any forceful/unnecessary appeal where participants are using this window to make a project moved out of competition for various reasons that do not fit the purview of the competition's conduct. 

While safeguarding competition spirit and fair play, competition control can choose its stand autonomously on whether a breach lies in 1 or 2 or neither category which will stand final and binding. Once appeal period is over, we will not disqualify any projects from entering the shortlist. 

Thanks for being a part of UNI. 

We'll keep you posted on this feature and updates soon.

 

Best
Competition Control
UNI