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Voting Clarification

Posted on 2005/08/18 18:26

The rules are a bit unclear between "participants" and "entrants". Apparently, an "entrant" is an individual or team which is going to be submitting an entry. This is the list on the right for "entrants" right?

Now, do participants, being entrants and team members who aren't submitting individual entries, going to be doing the voting for theme and voting other submittions? Or is it "one entry, one vote" where the teams as wholes will be counted as single votes?

thanks.

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Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-18 22:16

Yes, I've tried to make the terminology clear, but I had failed in a couple of places. I've cleaned up the section on judging (the section I presume you were referring to) to make it clear that individuals, and not teams perform the voting.

Comment by Arc on 2005-08-18 23:49

Thanks Richard.

One other issue. The competition is 10 days away, not 8. ;-) It's saying 8 at the top, which is confusing.

Understanding completely that this is the first PyWeek and the website code and wording has a few bugs and unclear things, and that's ok :-)

I'm worried that the teams have a huge advantage over individual entrants, but we'll see how it goes, and the imbalence does encourage teamwork so..

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-19 00:09

No, the comp is 8 days away... Check your local timezone start day (there's a link on the home page).

It's actually a few minutes less than 8 days right as I post this message, as the time just ticked over UTC midnight :)

Hurm. I just noticed that the timestamps in the diary pages are in AEST, which is UTC+10. I'll fix that.

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-19 00:15

There, fixed.

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-19 00:24

Oh, and on the teams thing...


Yeah, I have a gut feeling that teams *won't* be better-off than individuals (or at least, not significantly so). We won't know until the comp runs its course. If it happens that it is unfair then I'll change things for next time :)

Comment by Arc on 2005-08-19 00:33

Check the countdown timer too. It said 8 days before it changed to midnight UTC, and it's still 8 days now.

I guess 8 could work now, the countdown will read "0 days" until the competition on Saturday the 27th (will it start counting down hours:minutes?).

My only other constructive criticism is I think teams should be seperate from individuals in the interface, since it's confusing to both guys I know managing teams. "For next time" kind of thing.

Thanks again for putting this all together. I have a feeling this is going to be a fun week for all of us.

Comment by Arc on 2005-08-19 00:48

> Yeah, I have a gut feeling that teams *won't* be better-off than
> individuals (or at least, not significantly so).

Well yes, with poor management, even a team of three could easily become a charlie-foxtrot.

However, if you organize a team like we have, with programmers divided into different distinct tasks (all of whom are very experienced with proper OO coding), graphics and musicians with specific programmers working with them, a Q-A polish person or two for the latter half of the competition week, and a mostly non-contributing manager who just keeps everyone working together properly... things start looking a lot different.

Getting everyone to agree on certain things can take extra time, but I don't think that can outweigh the benefit of each member only having to tackle a small piece of the game.

Another imbalencing element is access to server resources. We've had a beta metaserver hosted for quite awile which I'll be opening up with (SIMPLE!) public API for the competition.

> We won't know until the comp runs its course.

Yea I guess time will tell on this one. As long as the scores of every entry are being shown seperatly, we can still award honorary prizes to the top scoring one-person entry.

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-19 00:56

Argh, you were quite right, the Zope DateTime object was being too smarty-pants for its own good. And to top it off, my own by-hand calculations were wrong too. Thanks for persevering. To make it a little more obvious, I've added a single floating point of precision to the display.

The countdown automatically switches to hours and minutes as appropriate.

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-19 01:02

Teams vs. individuals. We'll see. Have you seen some of the past 48-hour comp entries? It's frankly astounding what some people can produce in 48 hours.

I'm not sure what you mean by "teams should be seperate from individuals in the interface". Which interface in particular?

Comment by Arc on 2005-08-19 12:26

Well currently, the project leader IS the team. The username of the leader becomes the URL, and the same name is in the list of those belonging to the team. It's confusing. From a programming standpoint I can see why it was probobally done this way, makes sense. But most people apparently expect "teams" to be something seperate alltogether. How about instead of calling it a team, call them "entrants" vs "participants". Have "entrants" be something different from their username, and allow people to register for multiple entries prehaps. Have multiple people be able to sign on to work on an entry, and allow permissions to be given to entry participators to add/remove other users and similar administrative features. This could be tied into an upload interface for each entry, etc etc, where admin participants for the entry can upload, and individuals do the voting.

Comment by Richard Jones on 2005-08-20 02:40

That's quite a complex system you're describing there, Arc :)

What I've implemented is my best attempt at a middle-ground between required functionality (individuals sign up, join N teams, one person is team leader), the time I have available for development (very limited) and usability (I try my best :)