Hold on there folks

The May Showcase window closed at 5pm 10th May. Our three awesome judges are putting your stories under the microscope. Dan Mills, Jolisa Gracewood and Mark Osborne are busy making the hard choice of who wins what.

I submitted a story! What am I in for?

Prizes aplenty – from $50 to $500. Then all the way up to $2000 for the supreme winners later this year! And the adoration of the internet, of course.

We’ll announce the winners right here on 31st May 2013.

So what’s happening next?

More judging and new prizes! One showcase was never going to be enough, so come the end of May we reopen submissions for your stories.

Already thinking about what you’ll enter? Sneaky hint: your next stories will need to be about THE PRESENT. We’ll be calling for your best factual or fanciful tales about “right now” for August.

Sign up to our newsletter or join us on Twitter or Facebook to stay in the loop.

What does it take to be a winner?

Let these lovely people fill you in! Candy Elsemore knows what it takes:

And so do Alex Gibson & Graham Jenson:

See more fabulous winners from our past competitions

What makes a Mix and Mash story different?

Here’s where it gets interesting: Stories need to reuse at least ONE piece of NZ open content or data. Stuff like an image from DigitalNZ, a poem from the NZ Electronic Text Centre, a government report or data from data.govt.nz, for example.

Open what? Who with the right?

Put that Nicki Minaj track down! There’s a world of content and data out there that’s freely usable – it’s either not under copyright anymore, or the creator’s opened it up for this kind of thing. Isn’t that nice of them? We found a bunch of stuff you can use right now.