Legal
Official contest rules
How entries qualify, how coaching and judging work, how finalists and winners are decided, and what is awarded.
Draft. This page is not the document. It describes what the document will cover, so you can see the shape of it while an attorney writes the operative wording.
An attorney writes the official rules, and the founder has to confirm every number before that starts. Nothing is in force until then.
What this document will cover
- Categories: original, cover, and AI-assisted, one per entry
- The first entry is funded by a sponsor, so it costs the student nothing
- Encore entries
- Coaching, and the qualification standard
- The 15-second student message
- Publishing: the student's own channel, with a parent's permission, per video
- Votes: one per person per entry, and nothing that can be bought
- Boost Points and the Finale, and the one place they touch an outcome
- College savings support and the threshold that unlocks each boost
- Disqualification
- Appeals
In the meantime
How we protect students and what a parent needs to know describe how the product actually behaves today, in plain language. Where something is not settled, those pages say so.
Working draft in the repository: content/backstage-pass/rules-summary.md. It is an outline of intent for
counsel, not publishable text.