Any site that is receiving CHAOS attention is eligible for a contest.
That is a quote from the new blog post, More Notes on Contest Format. So that makes me wonder: Can any site do a contest? I mean, it says if you have CHAOS' attention you're eligible, but what about the ones that don't? Does that mean they can't start a contest?
As usually coming from Yannis, this answer is largely correct:
If there's strong community support for a contest, CHAOS and SE in general will help, whatever that quote may or may not be saying. Even if the site doesn't have a big event coming up, or any other reason to have CHAOS attention, we can always get their attention by screaming at the top of our lungs.
PS. A handful of people is not strong community support (just saying).
There's just one thing I would add: you don't need help from CHAOS to run a contest on your site! CHAOS is charged with figuring out cool stuff that communities can do to increase engagement and grow the community. Lauren's blog post highlighted a couple of things we've found that seem to work, and now any community that wants to try stuff is welcome to pick it up and run with it whenever they see fit. Feel free to tweak and change stuff to suit the needs of your specific community, and let us know if you have questions!
(The only real reason you would need to get CHAOS or Community involved is if you need Stack Exchange dev time to get the contest accomplished, or money for prizes. We on CHAOS ourselves are actually moving away from awarding prizes that cost money, however, since more than anything that type of thing attracts drive-by users who hit the site for the prize and then quit it. Not cool!)
The full quote:
Clearly, choosing a contest format depends heavily on the site and the event. Any site that is receiving CHAOS attention is eligible for a contest. However, as stated above, Mission contests will probably only be run on sites that already have big events happening in their community. I’m optimistic that with these few basic contest models and the suggestions provided in meta, we can continue to improve and come up with something that fits our sites even better.
My take on it:
If there's strong community support for a contest, CHAOS and SE in general will help, whatever that quote may or may not be saying. Even if the site doesn't have a big event coming up, or any other reason to have CHAOS attention, we can always get their attention by screaming at the top of our lungs.
That said, some communities will never have "big events" the way Gaming has (think: Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, etc), I don't have the slightest what the equivalent would be for a site like Programmers or The Workplace and it would be nice of CHAOS to show some attention to sites that are by nature a bit more difficult to promote.
PS. A handful of people is not strong community support (just saying).
