People Don't Care About What They Don't Get (ICPC)

I have been involved in programming contests for several years now, as contestant, problem setter, judge or executive (*shudder*.) My point is that nothing has helped my programming and engineering skills as much as this. Now, the most prestigious of all the programming contests is the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC.) Each year, in some 34 regions around the world, thousands of teams from all major universities compete and around 70 of them advance to the world finals. This is a really big deal. One of the ICPC regionals, is held each year for 7 years now in Sharif University of Technology. It is one of 11 sites in Asia. I myself have participated in the last 5 of them, and our team's placements have been 5th, 13th, 6th, 3rd and 4th. It is also interesting to know that in 2003 and 2005 (when we finished 6th and 4th respectively) 3 teams advanced from Tehran site but normally (including in 2004, when we were 3rd) two teams do. Anyway, I said all that to arrive at this. In my opinion, the ICPC World Finals is the single most important team-oriented event that a student in any technology-related field can participate in. It is more important than RoboCup or IEEE design competitions because it's accessible, it's entry barrier is not too high and for those reasons, people actually like to participate in the regionals or similar contests. And now this (in Farsi.) Through all the years that Sharif University has held a regional, Dr. M. Ghodsi has been the site director. I have seen that each year, while the excitement of the students and their participation levels have grown significantly, the support of the university officials (with the exception of a few, including Dr. Ghodsi) has diminished. As a result, each year the quality of the contest (execution-wise, not scientific) has gone downhill. I don't know what it takes to bring these type of events to government officials', industry sector managers' and media's attention. But I hope somebody thinks of something soon!