How we treat each other

Startup Ashoka 2026 is the flagship annual event of the InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship at Ashoka University. This page is about how people treat each other at it: in profiles, ideas, team names and invitations, in the group chats teams start from here, and in the room on the night. The chat is somewhere else and the room is not a web page, but the people are the same people, so both count.

That includes the event’s own WhatsApp community, which is open and which the organisers will invite you to. It is not part of this platform and nothing on this page gives Atlas any power over it, but it is part of the event, and what is expected of you there is what is expected of you here.

It applies to everyone taking part: participants, organisers, volunteers, mentors, judges, sponsors, and the Atlas team itself. Nobody is outside it because they built it, and nobody is outside it because they were invited to help.

What Atlas can actually do about a breach of it stops at the platform. Section 9 is exact about that, and about who the rest belongs to. The expectations are wider than our reach on purpose: a rule worth stating is worth stating even when somebody else enforces it.

Startup Ashoka runs for twenty-four hours overnight and puts three hundred students who mostly do not know each other into teams. That works when people are generous with each other, and stops working quickly when they are not.

• Assume the person on the other end is a stranger doing their best. A first-year with no idea and no team is exactly who this event is for.
• Take no for an answer. Somebody who turns down your invitation, or leaves your team, does not owe you an explanation.
• Be honest about what you can do. Overstating your skills to get onto a team is how people end up let down at 04:00.
• Disagree about the idea, not about the person. Being direct is welcome; being cutting about somebody is not the same thing.
• Look after each other overnight. If somebody is tired, unwell, upset or out of their depth, please tell an organiser. That is not telling on them.

Named specifically, because “be respectful” is not a rule anybody can be held to.

• Harassment of any kind, including sexual harassment, and including anything a reasonable person would find intimidating, degrading or humiliating.
• Comments aimed at who somebody is: their caste, religion, region, language, gender, gender identity, sexuality, disability, appearance, body size, age, nationality, background or economic circumstances. Deliberately using the wrong name or pronouns for somebody belongs in this list.
• Unwanted contact that carries on after being asked to stop. Once is a mistake; continuing is the thing this rule is about.
• Sexual attention or advances that were not invited, including through the message on an invitation or a request to join, and through group chats started from here, and sending anybody sexual or violent images.
• Threats, intimidation, stalking or following somebody around, online or in the room, and organising other people to pile on.
• Publishing somebody’s personal details, on this platform or off it, including a phone number a teammate gave you so the team could talk.
• Photographing or filming somebody who has asked you not to, and never anywhere people are sleeping or resting.
• Impersonating anybody: another student, an organiser, a judge, the Centre, or Atlas.
• Pressuring anybody about alcohol, including remarks about people who do not drink.
• Deliberately wasting people’s time: mass invitations to people you will not team up with, joining a team with no intention of contributing, or entering a team to obstruct it.
• Cheating, or trying to gain an unfair advantage, which includes passing off work that is not yours and anything that would make the result untrustworthy.

Ragging in any form is prohibited, however it is dressed up as a joke, a tradition or an initiation. It is banned by law and by the University, it is a separate matter from harassment with its own procedure, and there is no version of it this event tolerates.

It is worth being concrete, because the forms it takes at a competition are not the obvious ones: getting a junior student to do your work, making somebody spend money or take on a cost, singling out a first-year for errands or ridicule, and excluding somebody from a team to make a point. It counts online exactly as it counts in the room.

Most of what goes wrong at an event like this is not misconduct. It is three ordinary uncomfortable situations, so they are written down in advance.

Nobody has invited you

It is not a judgement on you, and it is extremely common on the first day. Please tell an organiser rather than waiting it out, because placing people is part of what they are there for.

Somebody is not contributing

Talk to them first, and to an organiser if that does not work. Please do not run a campaign about it in the group chat.

You need to leave a team

Allowed before the event starts, and you do not have to justify it. Tell your team and tell an organiser so nobody is left short at the deadline. Once the event starts the Leave button is switched off for everybody, so teams are not changing shape while they are being judged on it. If you genuinely need to leave during the event, an organiser can take you out.

One rule that is not negotiable: a team is not a place somebody can be trapped in. If a teammate is being made unwelcome, that is this page’s business and not an internal matter for the team to settle.

Your bio, your idea if you show it, your team’s name and what your team is building are read by other participants, and are checked against word lists: some wording is refused outright, and some is allowed through with a mark against it. A message you attach to an invitation or to a request to join is checked too, and that one is only ever refused. The terms of use set out which is which.

Being straight about the limit, because a promise that fails at 04:00 is worse than one we never made: this platform has not been assessed for accessibility and we make no claim that it conforms to any standard. It is built as ordinary web pages that zoom without breaking and work on a phone, and that is the honest extent of it. Two people cannot promise unlimited help across a twenty-four hour overnight event. What we will do is everything we reasonably can, and tell you straight away if something is beyond us.

Anything about the venue itself, such as step-free access, quiet space or rest areas, is the Centre’s rather than ours. Please ask them as early as you can rather than on the night; the earlier a request arrives the more likely it is to be met.

You do not have to be certain, you do not have to have evidence, and you do not have to decide how serious it is first. If something has made you uncomfortable, that is reason enough to say so.

If anyone is in danger

Get help in the room first and call the emergency services. Nothing on this page comes before that.

Any organiser, in person

At the event, the fastest route by a long way. Organisers will be briefed before the event to take a report seriously and to know what they are not the right person for.

The Centre

entrepreneurship@ashoka.edu.in, the organisers of the competition, and the right route for anything about a participant.

Atlas

Bobby Yu and Ramit Sachdev, admin@itsatlas.org. Please use this if the problem is on the platform, or if for any reason you would rather not go to the Centre first.

If the problem is one of us

Go to the Centre, or to the University, and do not come to Atlas at all. If your concern is about an organiser, a member of Atlas, or somebody who would read the message you were about to send, use a route that does not pass through them. That is not an awkward thing to do; it is what these routes are for.

The University, directly

You never need anybody’s permission to go straight to the University. See section 9.

Not the group chat

The event’s WhatsApp community is a good place to ask a question and a bad place to raise a concern about somebody. Everyone in it reads what you write, including the person you are worried about, and a few hundred people would see it before an organiser did. Please use one of the routes above, or message an organiser directly.

What helps us act quickly, if you have it and want to give it: what happened, when and where, whether it is still going on, who was involved, and whether anyone else saw it. None of it is required, and an incomplete report is far better than none.

Being exact about this is more use to you than sounding authoritative.

What Atlas can do about a report

Change a team name, so that a name which should not stand is replaced with one that should. It cannot be blanked, because a team has to be called something. Take somebody out of a team, or move them into another one, which leaves their account and everything they wrote untouched. Disband a team, which ends it for everybody on it and cancels every invitation it has out. Switch an account off, which ends its access immediately, takes the person out of their team and out of the participant list, and deletes nothing they wrote or gave us. And clear what somebody wrote about themselves, which sends them back through the setup screens. Every one of those is recorded against the person who did it and cannot be quietly undone. We can also correct a name or an email address and put an account back, which are support fixes rather than sanctions.

Reading is not one of them

Organisers can already read what you wrote, whether a bio, an idea, a team name or an invitation message, and reading it leaves no trace. Only actions do. The one exception is that the platform records that a search was run, never what was typed into it. We would rather you knew that than assumed the record covered everything.

What Atlas will not do

Investigate. We are not an investigating body, we have no training for it, and a two-person team should not pretend otherwise. We take what you tell us, act on the platform where we can, and pass it to the Centre.

What the Centre decides

Everything about the competition and about the event in the room: asking somebody to stop, asking somebody to leave, and whether a person or a team continues. Atlas does not make those calls and would not want to.

What only the University can handle

Sexual harassment and ragging go to formal procedures the University is required by law to have, run by committees constituted for the purpose. So does anything that could affect somebody’s studies or standing. Those exist whatever this page says. Nothing here limits your right to use them, and nothing here requires you to come to us first or to wait for us.

The police

Always open to you, at the same time as anything else. Reporting to Atlas, to the Centre or to the University does not replace a police complaint and does not delay one.

Please ask the Centre, or any organiser, for a committee’s current contact details. We would rather you were handed one that is current than read one here that has gone stale, as these are the University’s contacts and not ours to publish.

Written for what two people can actually do, not for what sounds reassuring.

• One of the two of us reads it, and during the event we will come back to you the same day. Outside the event it may take a couple of days, and we will still come back to you.
• If it concerns another participant we pass it to the Centre, because the Centre decides. We will tell you that we have.
• We act on the platform straight away if that helps, whether that is a name changed or an account switched off, without waiting for anything else to be resolved.
• The outcome might be nothing. Not every report leads to an action, and saying so is more honest than implying otherwise. If that is where it lands we will tell you, rather than letting it go quiet.

Confidentiality, honestly. We will tell as few people as we can, and only the people who need to know. We cannot promise you will never be identified: some things happen between two people, and someone who is told what was reported may be able to work out who reported it. We would rather say that than promise something we cannot keep. We will not publish an account of any report, and for complaints of sexual harassment, publishing one is against the law in India, so that is not merely a preference of ours.

Please stop, and do not argue about whether they were right to ask. That is the whole rule. Most of what goes wrong between people at an event like this is a misjudged joke or a message that landed badly, and it ends there if the person who sent it lets it.

If an organiser speaks to you about something, ask them what was reported and say your side. Asking is reasonable and we would expect it to be heard, but how that conversation runs is the Centre’s, and we are not going to promise it on their behalf. If your account is switched off, the terms of use say who to write to. Where a decision touches your studies or your standing at the University, the University’s own appeal routes apply and are not ours to describe or to stand in the way of.

The Centre

InfoEdge Centre for Entrepreneurship, Ashoka University, entrepreneurship@ashoka.edu.in

Atlas

Bobby Yu and Ramit Sachdev, admin@itsatlas.org

This is version 1.3, published on 18 September 2026. Version 1.2 was published on 3 September 2026, version 1.1 on 26 August 2026 and version 1.0 on 21 August 2026. What changed in 1.3 is summarised at the top of this page: when leaving a team is allowed, and the fuller list of what Atlas can do about a report. Version 1.2 described the event’s WhatsApp community as open rather than as opening, and made section 9 more exact about what switching an account off deletes. Nothing has changed about what is expected of you, what we can do, or where to report. If we change it again we will say so here with the date and what changed. This page is part of the terms of use; what the platform holds about you is in the privacy notice.

Written for this event rather than adapted from a template, but informed by the codes of conduct that hackathons and conferences have refined over a decade: Major League Hacking’s, the Berlin Code of Conduct, and PyCon’s, whose habit of writing down what actually happens after a report is the part most codes leave out. It has had no legal review.