Organiser FAQ

Jurika is an end-to-end platform for running a judged competition: it collects team entries, recruits and assigns judges, gives them a scoring rubric, calculates a fair ranking, and produces the results, awards and certificates — for both online and in-person events.

Organisers who run competitions with a panel of judges — schools, teachers, NGOs and programme runners. It’s designed for people who aren’t technical: you set the rubric and schedule, invite judges, and Jurika handles the fairness maths, the reminders, and the paperwork.

Any competition judged against a rubric — pitches, projects, innovation challenges, performances, science fairs. You choose one of two formats per event:

• Online — judges score remotely from links or videos you collect.
• Face-to-face — a live event with table seating, a judge walking plan, roll-call and check-in.

There is no “hybrid” mode by design — a clean single format keeps the assignment and fairness logic unambiguous.

For PaKSI Kelantan’s own programmes it is provided free, as a non-profit service. For other organisations a commercial tier is available through SyncMind. Either way the platform and its data handling are the same — the difference is who’s providing and supporting it.

Jurika runs on a managed server with automatic restart, a nightly off-site backup, and an uptime monitor. A separate staging copy is used to test every change before it reaches your live event, so updates never land in the middle of your judging.

You apply through the “Apply to host” form. An administrator reviews the application — your organisation details and any documents you upload — and, once approved, creates your host account and emails your sign-in. Approval is a real review step, not automatic, because hosts handle other people’s data.

Five clear stages, each unlocking the next:

• Draft — you’re still configuring it; nothing is public.
• Recruiting — entries and judge sign-ups are open.
• Ongoing — judges are scoring.
• Deliberation — you review the ranking and set awards.
• Complete — results confirmed, certificates ready, and (optionally) published.

Jurika won’t let you skip a prerequisite — e.g. you can’t open for entries until the rubric totals 100 points and a schedule is set.

Yes — turn on Practice mode when creating a competition. Jurika can seed dummy teams and judges, let you sign in as a practice judge and score, advance through deliberation, and generate results — a full dry run. Practice competitions send zero real emails and are hidden from public listings, and you can reset one to a fresh draft and walk it again.

Yes — upload a competition logo on the edit page and it appears on the entry and results pages. (Image only, up to 2 MB; SVGs are refused for safety.)

Most settings stay editable while recruiting. A few lock deliberately once they’d corrupt work in progress: the format fixes once the competition leaves draft, the rubric locks when judge assignments are generated, and award settings lock once results are published. You’re always warned before a locking action.

Three ways, and you can mix them:

• Jurika’s public form — you share a link; teams fill in their details.
• Your own Google Sheet — Jurika gives you a template sheet you manage, then syncs it two ways.
• An external link — if you collect entries on your own site, Jurika just links out to it.

Every competition now has both the public form and an always-available sheet, so you’re never boxed into one method.

Yes — it’s a two-way sync, not a one-time import. Jurika matches rows by a hidden ID column, so a team stays linked even if you rename it or fix an email in the sheet. When a team submits via the form, its row is added to your sheet automatically. When you Sync, Jurika shows you exactly what differs and lets you decide.

The Sync screen shows each difference side by side and you pick which value to keep — Jurika never silently overwrites. New rows you added in the sheet appear as “new teams to add” (with a consent tick), and a team you deleted in the sheet can be deleted from Jurika or restored — but only during recruiting, and only after you confirm. Once scoring has started, sheet edits to a team being judged are flagged, not applied, so a stray edit can’t disturb a live entry.

Yes. Each team gets a private manage link in their confirmation email — no account needed. They can view and edit their entry while entries are open. If they lose the link, a “recover” page re-sends it, but only to an email address already on the entry.

Yes, while the competition is still recruiting — there’s a host “add a team” button that uses the same entry form and the same consent checks. (Once judging has started, a brand-new team can’t be cleanly slotted into the assignments, so late adds are a recruiting-only action.)

Jurika enforces one entry per team-name-plus-leader-email, and flags a second team that reuses a participant’s email. On import it matches by the hidden ID first, then by team+leader, then warns you about a loose name-only match rather than silently adding a duplicate.

You control the fields, but Jurika supports minimal-data entries — a team name alone is enough to hold a place (useful when importing a roster before members’ details exist). You add the rest later, so you never collect more personal data than you need up front.

You define categories and the criteria under them, each with a point range. The criteria must total exactly 100 points — Jurika enforces this before you can open for judging. You can build it in a Google Sheet template and import it, or start from a ready-made default and edit.

Yes — each criterion can carry “low / medium / high” anchor descriptions that tell judges what each level looks like. Jurika also produces a pre-filled judge briefing PDF from your rubric so the whole panel scores against the same understanding.

No. There’s a “Fix wording” mode that lets you correct a criterion’s name, description or anchor text mid-judging without touching any scores. Point values and the criteria structure stay locked, so every mark already entered stays valid. Each change is recorded, and if some judges already scored, the deliberation view notes that the guidance was revised.

No — and that’s on purpose. Changing a criterion’s points, or adding/removing a criterion, would invalidate marks judges already gave. Only wording is editable once scoring begins.

Two paths: judges can self-register (email only — no long approval wall) and apply to your competition, or you can invite them directly. Either way, you approve who actually sits on your panel — a judge sees nothing about your entrants until you’ve approved them onto the competition.

Verification is a trust badge, not an access gate — it records that a judge was vouched for by a host or an administrator. An unverified judge can still be approved and score; verification just gives you extra confidence about who they are.

No. Judges see a team’s name, project and the deliverable links they need to score — never entrants’ emails or phone numbers, never your host-only fields. This is enforced in the code, not just hidden in the interface. Advisor names are also withheld to keep judging blind.

Assignment is conflict-of-interest aware: a judge isn’t given a team from their own organisation, and isn’t given two teams from the same organisation. (For internal events you can allow same-organisation judging explicitly.) If judges run short, Jurika relaxes the rule only as a last resort and warns you, rather than silently pairing a conflict.

You choose. For online events a “judges per team” setting drives the auto-assignment, and a load planner shows the workload. More judges per team gives a steadier fair score; Jurika balances the load evenly across the panel.

If a judge joins after judging has started, they land in standby (a reserve pool) instead of being handed idle work mid-event. You activate a reserve when you actually need to cover a team — which keeps the panel tidy and avoids the “approved judge with nothing to do” trap.

Judges can turn off optional emails (invitations, reminders, results) in their profile. Essential messages — sign-in links, assignment notices, closure — always send. Practice competitions and staging never send real mail at all.

For online events Jurika auto-assigns with one click — spreading the load evenly, respecting conflicts of interest, and keeping the judge-team graph connected so the fairness maths can calibrate. For face-to-face it builds table seating and a judge walking plan (which group visits which tables, in order).

Different judges are strict or lenient by different amounts. Jurika computes a fair score that corrects for each judge’s strictness — measured against their peers on the teams they share — so a team isn’t punished for drawing the harsh judges. The raw average is always shown alongside as a cross-check, and the correction only applies when the assignments are connected enough to calibrate it.

Deliberation is your review console before results go out. It ranks teams by fair score, surfaces the close medal cut-offs and any teams worth a second look, and lets you set or confirm each award. It’s a host-and-admin tool — judges don’t see it.

You choose the award rule — by percentage of the field, a fixed count, or a fair-score threshold — and Jurika assigns gold/silver/bronze/participation accordingly. You can override an individual team’s tier, or disqualify a team (it stays ranked for the record but gets no medal or certificate and is left off the public page). Every override is logged.

The judge can hand back the teams they can’t get to (with a reason — no penalty for an honest early hand-back). Each handed-back team is then offered to the best available judge, who accepts or declines in-app. If nobody’s free, the team surfaces on your progress page with a ranked, conflict-aware recommendation of who to contact — complete with a WhatsApp link — so you can place it yourself.

After the deadline (plus a grace window you set), Jurika automatically moves genuinely-unscored teams to other judges — preferring judges who’ve finished their own work and aren’t conflicted. A team that’s already been rescued once and is missed again is held for you to handle rather than bouncing endlessly. Your progress page always shows which teams are at risk and who’s blocking them.

Use “Reassign” on the assignments page. Jurika moves the team atomically (no team is ever left orphaned), warns you if the new judge is a same-organisation conflict, and only discards the old judge’s marks for that team if you explicitly confirm it.

Yes. A judge who hands back a team can take it back until another judge has accepted it. And from your side you can hand a team back to its original judge. Every move is recorded as a first-class history entry, so the full path of a team (original → moved → moved again) is always traceable.

Changing the venue asks every approved judge to re-confirm they can still attend — each gets an email and replies “I’ll be there” or withdraws with no penalty. You see an “awaiting re-confirm” badge per judge. (Once the event day has started, the venue is locked.)

Mark it absent — its scores are kept, not deleted, so the mark is reversible if they turn up. Absent and removed teams are excluded consistently from assignments, progress, ranking and the public results, so every view agrees.

You confirm the awards (which unlocks certificate preparation), then release — either “Broadcast now” or a scheduled time you set. Publishing is optional: you can announce your own way and simply leave the competition finalised. Until you publish, you can reopen deliberation and adjust; once published, the record locks.

You choose which roles receive the announcement (leaders, advisors, mentors, extra adults, members). For minors’ protection, all roles are off by default — you deliberately opt each one in. Judges are never in the participant blast; they get a separate closure message and see their own teams’ outcomes in-app.

Judges never see the raw ranking or other judges’ scores. At closure they see only their own teams’ outcomes (the award tier). The full ranking is a host-and-admin view.

Jurika generates participant certificates (gold/silver/bronze/participation, plus one for non-participant adults) and judge certificates from a design you set up. Each team’s PDFs land in a shared Drive folder, and one email per team sends the leader and adults the folder link. You can regenerate a single team’s certificates without touching the rest, and the folder link stays stable.

Yes — there’s a letter designer for judge appointment letters (with your letterhead, footer and a signature), and each judge can download theirs.

Names, emails and team/project text can still be corrected after publishing (scores and awards can’t change), then you regenerate that team’s certificates. So a misspelled name is a quick fix, not a reprint of everything.

Only what a competition needs: team and project details, participant and responsible-adult names and contacts, the deliverables you ask for, judges’ scores and comments, and the account details of hosts and judges. You configure the fields, and Jurika supports collecting the minimum (a team name alone is enough to start).

Three layers: for an under-18 competition, entries capture the responsible adult’s consent (enforced on both the form and on sheet imports, via a host attestation); judges never see entrants’ contact details; and results announcements to participant roles are opt-in, off by default. The leader can even be a minor, with the adult as the required contact.

Yes — a privacy notice in English and Bahasa Malaysia, adopted by PaKSI Kelantan, describing what’s collected, why, who it’s shared with, retention, and data-subject rights. A data-protection officer is designated and a breach-response runbook is in place, aligned to Malaysia’s PDPA (including the 2024 amendments).

For a school’s competition, the school is treated as the data controller and Jurika as the processor acting on your instructions — there’s a data-processing agreement template for this. In plain terms: it’s your data; Jurika handles it for you and doesn’t repurpose it.

Yes. An administrator can look a person up (by email, or by name for entries that have none) and export everything held about them, or erase them on request. Erasure anonymises — it scrubs the personal identifiers everywhere they appear (including in the exported sheet copy and any uploaded documents) while keeping the competition’s history and scores intact, so the record isn’t corrupted.

Google (Sheets and Drive, for your entry sheet and certificate delivery) and an email service for notifications. Data sent to them is the minimum needed. Certificate folders shared “anyone-with-link” contain only a name on a certificate — nothing sensitive is shared by link.

Competition history is retained deliberately, so your programme keeps its record of past events and results; personal data is erased on request through the data-subject process above. The privacy notice states this.

There’s a written breach-response runbook with named emergency contacts and the regulator-notification step, and a designated data-protection officer — so a breach triggers a defined process, not improvisation.

Email is never on the critical path — a submission, a score, or a reassignment is saved first and the email goes out in the background, so a slow or failed mail server can’t turn a successful action into an error. Confirmation emails that don’t go out are retried automatically, and there’s a self-service “resend my link” page. Failures are surfaced to administrators, not swallowed.

The submission is saved to Jurika’s database first, then best-effort mirrored to your sheet. If the sheet write fails, the entry is safe — the sheet simply lags, your out-of-sync indicator flags it, and the next Sync reconciles it. A flaky Google API or a deadline-night rush can never fail a submission.

Yes — a nightly database backup, copied off the server to private cloud storage so it survives losing the machine, and each backup is automatically restore-tested to prove it actually works. Before any update that changes the database, a fresh snapshot is taken first. The uploaded files (certificate designs, letterheads, logos) are backed up too.

No. Every action that must be all-or-nothing (confirming assignments, reassigning a team, publishing) runs as a single database transaction — it either completes fully or not at all, so a crash can’t leave you half-changed. Scores autosave as judges enter them.

An uptime monitor watches the app and the background scheduler; a “scheduler down” banner appears if the timed jobs (reminders, deadline processing) stop; a schema-health check flags any drift; and an in-house error monitor catches problems. Administrators are alerted rather than finding out from a user.

By email — hosts and judges use a password or a one-time magic link sent to their inbox. There’s no long registration wall for judges: they can self-register and start, and you approve who joins your panel. Administrators sign in through a separate, hardened door.

Three: host (you — run competitions you own), judge (score assigned teams), and administrator (platform operations and data-protection tooling). A host can only ever see and act on their own competitions.

Every action re-checks the person’s role and that they own the thing they’re touching (not just at the page level); sign-in links are single-use and short-lived; passwords are hashed; sign-in and sign-up attempts are rate-limited; and traffic is over HTTPS. If an account is suspended, its active sessions are killed immediately. The codebase is put through a repeated security-and-fairness audit.

Yes — Practice mode is a full sandbox with dummy teams and judges and no real emails. It’s the recommended first step for a new host: run a complete competition end to end, reset it, and run it again until you’re comfortable.

Yes, subject to a per-host limit an administrator sets for you. Each competition is fully independent — its own entries, judges, rubric, schedule and results.

Reach out to your Jurika contact (PaKSI Kelantan for its programmes, or SyncMind for the commercial tier). There’s also an in-app feedback widget, and administrators can look into anything competition-specific for you.