Fumpetition.org is a hobby project started for fun, yet aiming beyond plain fun.

IMHO, at times things done for fun have higher chances of developing into something significant than if a serious goal had been pursued up front. Working on a serious project sets some constraints that may pose barriers to exploring all possibilities. Doing things for fun enables more freedom in a couple of ways:

• there are no deadlines and/or stakes
• failures are not painful (as long as we talk about achieving some kind of goals; surely enough, engaging in risky behaviour can still result in painful experience which is by no means fun)
• motivation is entirely sincere, decisions are always honest

Of course, there are downsides, too:

• less resources (time, money, etc) are available for fun projects
• absent a fixed objective, the focus of fun activity may drift uncontrollably; on the other hand, this is exactly why it may end up in a new unexplored territory full of opportunities for fascinating discoveries.

Fumpetition.org aspires to become a constant source of fun ideas to try, fun challenges to tackle and fun inventions (funventions?) to arrive at. At the same time, I expect that all that extra fun activity will generate some tangible by-products benefitting much broader audience.

An ideal outcome would be if Fumpetition.org triggers a fundamental technological breakthrough.

Why “fumpetition”?

“Fumpetition” is a portmanteau of fun and competition. You may argue that a straightforward blend of those two words should be funpetition. However the latter sounds more like a humorous petition. To counter that effect it was decided to take advantage of a rule whereby certain prefixes (such as “con-”, “in-”) adjust to better fit the letter that follows them:

• con- becomes col- before l: collaborate, collect, collide (and similarly for in-: illicit, illegal, illuminate);
• con- becomes com- before m, b, or p: communicate, combine, compose (and similarly for in-: immortal, imbalance, import);
• con- and in- turn cor- and ir- before r: correlation, correspond, irresponsible, irregular

Therefore, considering fun as a prefix, its union with petition gives birth to fumpetition. Note still that the funpetition variants of the fumpetition domain names are also registered (just in case) and redirect to the canonical form.