Ambassador guidelines

Surge Ambassadors bring the ecosystem to their campus or city. It’s a leadership role, it earns recognition, and it’s one of the best ways to grow your own network while helping others start building.

What an Ambassador does

• Acquisition — get applicants.
• Awareness — run events.
• Community — create and run local groups and chapters.
• Content — share Surge products and stories.
• Activation — help people register AND actually start.

What an Ambassador does NOT do

Judge projects, make Product Passport decisions, do technical verification, or run mentor review — these create conflicts of interest.

How it works

• Your referral code. A unique link; everyone who registers through it is tracked to you and your chapter.
• What’s rewarded. Activated and verified builders — not raw signups.
• Your dashboard. Your funnel: registrations, onboarded, active, completed, verified — and your chapter rank.

The one rule — quality, not noise

If rewards came from raw registrations, someone would blast a link to 5,000 WhatsApp groups for 5 real joiners. So the score rewards quality: registration = 1, onboarded = 3, active Week 1 = 5, completed project = 10, verified project = 20. Bring people who genuinely want to build — that’s what earns recognition, and that’s what helps.

Chapters

A chapter is how Surge reaches your place or your people. It can be a campus (“VIT Surge Builders”), a city (“Chennai AI Builders”), or an audience — Women Builders, Developers, Career Switchers, an Enterprise-sponsored chapter, or Online India.

Each month, chapters run as part of one Surge cohort, on the same 4-week calendar and the same standard — so a Product Passport means exactly the same thing in every chapter. You pick one chapter when you apply.

Chapters run build nights, build circles, orientation before a cohort, peer support during, and demo showcases after. Everyone belongs to one permanent Surge Builder Network — cohorts and chapters are layers inside it, never abandoned after a cohort ends.

Chapter themes

Some chapters run a theme — a focus like Claude-first, MCP, or open-source models — so you can build with the stack you’re most curious about. Themes change what you build with, never how your work is judged: every chapter is held to the same five gates, the same rubric, and the same Product Passport standard. Surge sets the themes centrally so each one comes with the right learning material and mentors — your Passport means the same thing whichever theme you chose.

Chapter Leads

A Chapter Lead runs a chapter’s local community for a cohort — the funnel, the roster, the events, and the ambassadors who bring people in. It’s a leadership role, often taken up by alumni.

To keep the credential fair, Chapter Leads (like Ambassadors) do not judge projects, run verification, or decide Product Passports — that stays with the central mentor pool and the Foundation. Lead the community; the standard stays central.