Will have to think about it more but off top of head, maybe that would be a group that hosts jams? Atm, I don't have way for that to happen but a group certainly could be created to organize and promote the annual jams. Otherwise, I think annual but separate jams are still going to be looked forward to / work together provided they follow a similar format.

Jams are quite self contained and meant to have a defined start, end plus results. It would be very challenging and probably confusing to have sections within a single jam for annual ones vs everyone knowing exactly what jam they are looking at.

I look forward to seeing how you and others use jams in ways I didn't anticipate including methods of promoting annual ones. I attempted to make them as flexible as possible while still maintaining a consistency so that everyone knows whats going on.

yeah its for the members being able to officially host their own events.

Thanks.
The old contests and events were converted for a few reasons:

• Make sure community hosted jams and our future official jams could do everything we've done in the past.
• Provide extremely valuable real world testing data while developing jams.
• Populate our jams system and allow cross promotion via our jams widgets. Here's yours. It would be empty right now if I didn't convert old, now it presents your and everyone's past participation.
• Eliminate what would have been two dead sections (contests & events) since all future official and unofficial contests & events are going to be in the jams system. We would have had contests, events and jams.... would have been very confusing to new and existing members.
• New jams system breaths more life & exposure to past contests & events which are full of high quality content.
• The challenge of doing it.
  

Jams extend groups which extend members. The three systems are combining years of work to allow the greatest amount of flexibility, control and consistency between them all. Small example, you know how to customize your profile as a member... so you know how to customize group profiles and your mainly learning how to manage roles and collaborate. Well, now jams are brand new but will be "easy" to use to anyone that has customized their profile or worked with groups. While FAQs were developed for groups they will be very useful for some Jams. The benefits are compounding. Without even launching a Jam, you have a good idea of what is possible with the profile except jams allow unique widgets, moderation plus full profile theme customization. You just have to learn the new and fun stuff.

I would suggest to keep the old page layout for events and contests

Agreed. Probably just because we're so used to Events/Contest, cuz they have been there for years.

Yes!

They are but they can't rate their own submission. Think for the most part, judges are not going to enter their own jam when there is an official judge team. Hmm.


There are 4 different judge modes to choose from:


I suppose we could prevent official judges from entering the jam but you can see how the other modes specifically allow it. So it wouldn't change there.

At the moment, jams are in closed beta. After a few are under our belt, we'll open them up for level 5+ members to create, host and organize and that's when it should really come alive and make the jam calendar much more interesting to browse.