So deep thought
Ok i think that 30 judges way is better than the 50/50 way
Just show the classification with the rate amount and the single votes, no?

Lol Standard deviation is just a formula... which I guess we could enter in... but i forget what it is now

Alright, it would seem we've come to a majority conclusion which caters for both people in favour of the community vote, and people in favour of fair results. Props to Matthias for the original idea.

What we'll do for WTB 2012 is have a select panel of 20 judges. (Not 30 due to the extra community voting) These judges will be valued members of the community chosen by staff, who we deem to be responsible, valuable and above all else - fair and unbiased. These judges won't be changed throughout the entire competition for the sake of consistency.

The community will also vote on who they want to go through to the next round. They won't award points to every team, but they will award their own personal 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. Those votes will go in to a pot. The judges will do exactly the same, awarding their personal 1st, 2nd and 3rd. When all of these votes are combined, the judges points awarded will be multiplied by the ratio of judges to community votes (this is where the spreadsheet would come in)

This ensures that the judges play the exact same role as the community, 50/50 in the outcome of who goes through to the next round based on initial votes. The teams with the lowest amounts of votes will be eliminated from the competition. IF it comes to it that only say... 5 teams gain 100% of the votes, the judges will then decide who else goes through and will have the final say over the community vote. This is unlikely to happen, but the result would be fair and unbiased.

The competition would be spread over 4 rounds, each round lasting 6 weeks (1.5 months)

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Does that sound fair to you guys? If I missed something out then let me know.

Sounds good!

Sounds like a proper organised plan to me. I think having a 50/50 split between the public and judges will offer accurate and unbiased results, while ensuring that the public still have the power to influence decisions. The top 3 idea also sounds good, as it's a lot simpler and easier to choose those who make it through to the next round.

I think more teams should be kicked out in the first two rounds (perhaps the top 1/3 or even 1/4 of teams should progress - I think in WTB's gone by it's been the top 1/2 or so), in order to weed out those who clearly won't have a chance to win. Then as the competition progresses perhaps being a little more lenient on who progresses could be a good idea. This way a potential winning team won't be kicked out if their work is a little below par.

I propose a 1/4 of the teams progress through the first round, then 1/3 of the teams for the second round, and then approximately half of the teams for the third round.

Here's an example using some fairly good and easy numbers. Last there were 97 registered teams, so assume this year we get a little more at 108. We can then make 9 divisions of 12 teams (randomly chosen and mixed - perhaps checked over before the competition starts to ensure that most divisions are of equal quality artists). If 3 teams progress per division (1/4 of teams in each division), then we'll get a total of 27 progressing teams. We then make 3 divisions of 9 teams. In these 3 more teams will progress (1/3 of teams in each division). Now we'll be down to the top 9 teams, and in one division only 4 teams progress to the final. The final then consists of 4 teams battling it out, rather than the regular two. Often we get some teams unable to compete at the last round (due to real life circumstances), so I think this will alleviate the possibility of a victory by default which wouldn't really be an exciting finish that we would expect

We could have a similar thing to the heats in running races too... and have 'next fasters losers' progress... i.e. an extra two high scoring teams that were excluded from the vote.. that way if it is close, or if there is a particularly strong division, teams can still progress...

But yeh - sounds like a plan

Yeah I agree, perhaps in divisions where the voting is really close it could be at the judges discretion to include extra teams that are worthy of making it through. It could even be used if the numbers don't quite work out, and another few teams are needed to make all the divisions equal in numbers for example.

I put together a spreadsheet this afternoon that automatically determines the placings based on the votes given by judges and public voters alike. The only thing I forgot about is adding a feature for the times when someone from a competing team votes - they will need to have the average vote added on at the end. I also added some sample data to ensure that it was working and I think it is.

Without further ado, here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avbvzkbauq_BdGhMS0NRR0NGZzd5MTV2R1dnTm0xVHc#gid=0

I had the average feature for the competing team vote wotsit built into my old spreadsheet... shouldn't be too hard to reach a conclusion by merging some features together. Looks good though klaus, but I'll have a proper look later today.

Edit: Just realised we can use spearman's rank correlation coefficient to calculate the trend in voting and check that the general public votes aren't too far away from the judges general opinion

Yeah I just added it in then. All that is required is for the person who is tallying the votes to type in how many people from a team voted in that division and it'll add the average points for however many times the team voted.

Damn my excel skills are rusty - I was having real trouble with cell referencing before so I ended up having to type in the formula every time rather than copying it over and having excel do the rest of the work. Still don't know where I went wrong, but it's working regardless.

AWESOME!!! That'll be so interesting.....

Edit: Oh and you'll figure out why I only have the top 4 on the final standings when you check out the formula required to build a table like that. I don't even know what the hell is going on in there, I just copied it from a website