It's finally time to announce Atlassian Codegeist IV, our fourth annual plugin competition. It's been a somewhat longer wait than usual for our fourth competition to roll around, but we're sure this years' competition will be more exciting than ever.  Atlassian has achieved some very important milestones this year. We've released Confluence 3.0, Fisheye/Crucible 2.0, and are this close to releasing JIRA 4.0 (there are betas already!). With all the capabilities of these brand new major releases, we're confident that this will be the most exciting Codegeist so far. We're giving away fabulous cash and prizes to the person or team who comes up with the coolest, most useful, most elegant plugin or integration for any of Atlassian's products. As is our tradition now, we're switching up the prize categories again this year. We will be giving away prize packages for the following categories: Grand Prize - Best overall plugin. This plugin can come from one of our categories or surprise us and make up your own. Wow us! Runner Up - Who says coming in 2nd place is still losing? Category Prize(s) Best Cross-product Integration - this prize the rewards the best integration work (plugin, gadget or otherwise) that integrates two or more Atlassian products or an Atlassian Product in an interesting way with an external system. Best Theme - we're not superficial, but for this category it is what's on the outside that counts. Make Confluence look like a million bucks. Any CSS modifications or Theme Plugins are eligble. Most elegant use of Javascript - Atlassian values the front-end as much as the back-end. We're brushing up our own javascript skills, and we think you should do the same. Usability and interactivity are the watchwords in this category. OpenSocial Gadget - we're bringing OpenSocial to the Enterprise. And this is a great chance for you to learn about the new technology – any plugin that includes an OpenSocial Gadget is eligble for this prize. We bet you'll love writing gadgets!

Winners will be announced LIVE at AtlasCamp on October 21, so plan on attending!* *You don't need to be present at AtlasCamp to win, but it'll sure be more fun!

As with anything in life, there are rules. These are yours.

What

• Your contest submission will be a plugin for JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Crowd, Fisheye, or Crucible or an extension, client or integration that works with those products.
• You may submit several plugins or extension working together, across products. That would be extra impressive.
• All entries must be contributed under the  Apache 2 License license, per our Terms and Conditions.
• You may not modify the product source code. (You are, however, welcome to read, copy, extend and override the product source code under the regular terms of your license.)
• You're not allowed to submit anything that has been posted in the Plugin Libraries prior to the close of Codegeist III, on May 9th 2008. However, if you would like to extend or enhance an existing plugin, then go for it. But understand that you will be judged only on the additions you've made.
• If you're stuck for a good idea, check out the Plugin Wishlist page, which has a load of suggestions for plugins that someone, somewhere thought would be interesting and useful. (There is no guarantee that these ideas actually are interesting or useful, but they may be worth a shot.)

When

Plugins must be submitted no later than 11:00pm, October 18th, 2009 (UTC/GMT) (That's 4pm San Francisco time and 10am Monday Sydney time).

Who

Teams may include up to but no more than three people. (See official rules for eligibility.) We encourage you to find collaborators from the Atlassian developer community. You might also try the developer forums if you're looking for team members.

How Often

Enter as often as you like. Individuals may enter as members of more than one team.

Prizes

This year, we've divided Codegeist into six prize categories. Each category offers a top prize, worth $5,000. With each prize you'll also receive selection of other goodies from some of Atlassian's favourite companies around the world. 

See the Prizes page for all the details.

Judging

All entries will be judged by the Atlassian Dev team, based on the following four criteria: Usefulness, Creativity & Elegance, Completeness, and Code Quality and Documentation.

See the Judging page for all the details.

What's in this for Atlassian?

1. New plugins make our products more capable, which helps us sell more licenses. (Gotta move the units.)
2. We want more people to learn how to develop plugins. Once they try it, we hope they'll think it's fun and keep doing it. (Leading to #1.)
3. We want to learn how we can make writing plugins smoother and easier. If you run into any frustrations or questions while you're creating your masterpiece, let us know and we'll make it better.
4. We're damned excited to see what you, our users, build!

Sponsors

Our sincere thanks to Balsamiq, Gliffy, InfoQ, JetBrains, O'Reilly, Sysbliss, and YourKit. You guys rock!