Each team will need to have one person who they designate as being responsible for requesting reimbursements from the Richmond Section. This person must live within the Richmond Section. (See the General FAQs for the details on which parts of the state of Virginia lie within the Richmond Section.) This person will collect the receipts for their team and submit an expense reimbursement request using SAP’s Concur (NextGen) expense reporting program. Concur is widely used by companies to handle expense reports. Expense reports can be submitted from your computer or from your smartphone. Complete instructions for how to file expense reports will be provided to the person who your team designates as being responsible for reimbursements once their identity has been confirmed.

In addition, co-sponsors may choose to help fund some projects. Any reimbursements that come from co-sponsors will be handled directly between the teams and the co-sponsors.

Mentors are expected to help Problem Solver teams with the process of discovering and implementing solutions to their chosen problems. They should not just be presenting the solution to their Problem Solver team and asking them to implement it.

Mentors may be experienced in a particular technology that can be used to solve a problem or they may be experienced in how the product development process works. They do not need to experts in “everything.” Teams may choose to have multiple Mentors who help them with different aspects of their proposed solution.

Mentors who work with children will need to comply with the IEEE “Requirements for Groups Working with Children.” (These requirements can be found under the “Other Useful Resources” section of this website.) Mentors who do not wish to be bound by requirements for working with minors can still be Mentors but may not mentor any Problem Solver teams that include minors.

Problem Owners need to describe the problem that needs to be solved. They do not need to describe the exact solution to the problem, but they do need to describe any key characteristics that the solution needs to satisfy. For example, if the solution needs to be portable, they would need to say so. Also, the Problem Owner should describe who the solution will be for and why they need the solution. This is not meant to be a “justification” for the solution. It is meant to help the Problem Solvers understand whether their proposed solution is viable. For example, if the solution is meant to be used by an in-home healthcare nurse, the Problem Solving team may look at their proposed solution and say to themselves “But this won’t work for an in-home healthcare nurse because…”

Problem Owners should also be willing to respond to Problem Solvers’ questions.

Problem Owners are not expected to pay for the Problem Solver teams to work on solutions to their problems. Any Problem Owners who do want to help teams financially or with free goods and services are invited to also register as Co-sponsors.

Co-sponsors are companies, groups, or organizations that choose to work with the IEEE Richmond Section on the Pandemic Challenge by offering Problem Solver teams some type of free goods, services, or funding that they can make use of while working on the Pandemic Challenge. Co-sponsors will be acknowledged on this website and in the various forums that we use to promote the event.

Co-sponsors must agree to abide by the IEEE Requirements for Groups Working with Children (see the link in the Useful Resources section of this website) or an equivalent set of requirements. For example, a school system that provided some type of goods or services to Problem Solver teams could make use of their own internal requirements for working with minors. A company that chose to not work with minors could impose that as a requirement for providing assistance to Problem Solver teams. The important thing is that any children who do participate must be able to do so in a safe way.