I co-run SUPAXXL, a parkour community based in London. What started as a local competition format evolved into Supa Takeover, a platform designed to let any community run their own. This is about how we got there.
Most community events don't scale beyond the people who run them. They're tied to a single location, a specific moment in time. Hard to replicate and hard to hand off to anyone else.
How do you create something that any community can run, not just attend?
That question shaped everything. Not "how do we make a better event" but "how do we make a system that works without us."
We started locally. Yard Takeover was a month-long competition format built for the London parkour community, running out of Yard in Greenwich.
The format centred on roughly 200 challenges spread across the month. Participants submitted short video clips, scored and fed into a leaderboard called the Takeover League. The system was designed to sustain engagement over weeks, not just a single day. Challenges frequent enough to keep people coming back, with public submissions so progress was visible to the whole community.
It worked. Engagement held across the full month. People who weren't regulars started showing up. We had something we could learn from.
Building in frequent challenges and public submissions was deliberate. We wanted to shape behaviour, not just fill a calendar. Frequent, achievable challenges gave people a reason to come back the next day. The leaderboard made progress visible. Public submissions meant participants were also creating content, which pulled more people in from the edges of the community.
Once we'd proven the model locally, the next step was making it portable. Supa Takeover takes those same core mechanics and turns them into something any organiser can run in their own city. The submission format and scoring were already proven. The harder problem was making everything simple enough that someone in a different city could pick it up without us in the room.
The platform isn't tightly controlled. It gives communities enough structure to run something consistent while leaving room for them to make it their own.
Yard in Greenwich shaped the identity of everything we built. Raw and urban. We deliberately avoided the kind of polished event branding that would feel out of place there. The visual identity leaned into gritty textures and minimal production, with references that felt authentic to the community rather than designed to explain it to outsiders.
That identity became part of what makes the format recognisable. It also travels. The same aesthetic works in other cities because it's grounded in something real rather than built for mass appeal.
A lot of the system design was about influencing behaviour without making it feel engineered. Public submissions gave people visibility. Leaderboards created progression. Cash prizes and sponsor rewards gave people a reason to push harder.
We also identified a gap in participation: women were underrepresented in competition formats like this. Introducing equal prize pools was one of the most direct ways to address it, and it worked. Messaging shifted too, and the community response followed.
Yard Takeover built towards a final live event: London Massive. It was the physical payoff for a month of online participation. A full day with speed competitions, tricks-for-prizes, open jam sessions, and sponsor involvement.
Around 100 people came. A large proportion of them had been taking part throughout the month, which meant the event felt like a community arriving rather than a crowd assembling.
Not all systems live in software. Some live in communities.