Recommender System Challenges such as the Netix Prize, KDD Cup, etc. have contributed vastly to the development and adoptability of recommender systems. Each year a number of challenges or contests are organized covering different aspects of recommendation. In this tutorial and panel, we present some of the factors involved in successfully organizing a challenge, whether for reasons purely related to research, industrial challenges, or to widen the scope of recommender systems applications. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).