The contests, rules and submission guidelines and procedures were designed by Peter Griffin, Manisha Lakhe and Annie Zaidi.

Our online judging system was custom-created for us by Megha Murthy.

Participants make their submissions within a prescribed time-frame. The system automatically refuses entries after the pre-set deadline has expired. So no sneaking in entries after the shutters drop.

The system lets the contest managers automatically enforce limits like word- and character-counts.

Participants’ entries are linked with their personal information, but this information is not displayed to the the judges.

The judges log in privately, and anonymously evaluate each entry during a prescribed time frame. They see only the contest entries; no personally identifying information from the contestants, and no view of each other’s ratings.

After each round is completed—which is when all the acredited judges have finished scoring all the entries available at that stage of judging—the system automatically calculates qualifiers or winners.

In most of our contests, we use a two-stage judging system. A screening jury, usually Caferati’s editors, evaluates and scores every entry to yield a short list, the entries that have made it past a pre-determined criteria, which could be a minimum point score, say an average score of at least 6, or a certain number of entries, say the top 50. Then, in the second stage, the final jury evaluates annd scores the short list and the system automatically calculates winners.

Competitors—and anybody else with web access—get to see how every judge has rated each entry, but they cannot link a particular score to a particular judge.