This is all great except for the contest part, which I might currently have moderate ethical objections to. In general I'm concerned by contests which are held as an alternative to just paying someone to do the work for you; I objected to the contest that SI used to select their new logo (which is great) for the same reasons.
Essentially what you're doing is asking some unknown number of people to work for highly unpredictable pay, which is mostly likely to be (assuming at least a half-dozen entries), no pay at all. This tactic makes lots of financial sense and I understand why it would appeal to a cash-strapped non-profit, but it seems to me that if you're going to ask someone to do work for your benefit, you should pay them for it. This is a slightly muddier ideal when it comes to non-profits because I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with asking people to volunteer their time. Perhaps it's the uncertainty that's bothering me; it's as though you're asking people to gamble with their time.
So perhaps it's ethically equivalent to a charity-sponsored raffle, which I don't object to. Is my reasoning wrong, or am I just inconsistent? I'm not sure.
An alternative that you might consider more ethical is to limit the number of contestants and determine payment (or lack thereof) based on an absolute measure of quality rather than through competition.
When I showed up at the Singularity Institute, I was surprised to find that 30-60 papers' worth of material was lying around in blog posts, mailing list discussions, and people's heads — but it had never been written up in clear, well-referenced academic articles.
Why is this so? Writing such articles has many clear benefits:
Of course, there are costs to writing articles, too. The single biggest cost is staff time / opportunity cost. An article like "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import" can require anywhere from 150-800 person-hours. That is 150-800 paid hours during which our staff is not doing other critically important things that collectively have a bigger positive impact than a single academic article is likely to have.
So Louie Helm and Nick Beckstead and I sat down and asked, "Is there a way we can buy these articles without such an egregious cost?"
We think there might be. Basically, we suspect that most of the work involved in writing these articles can be outsourced. Here's the process we have in mind:
If this method works, each paper may require only 50-150 hours of SI staff time per paper — a dramatic improvement! But this method has additional benefits:
This is, after all, more similar to how many papers would be produced by university departments, in which a senior researcher works with a team of students to produce papers.
Feedback? Interest?
(Not exactly the same, but see also the Polymath Project.)