[Foss4g2009] Voting bias

[Volker Mische]

Hi Ricardo,

I guess I need to clarify some things about the current voting system.
At the beginning of this year, there was time to decide whether OCS [1]
is used for managing the Abtracts or something else. OCS is hard to
configure and meant for an academic conference, with peer reviews and
all that stuff. Therefore there was also no way to vote for the Abstracts.

As I (and many more) thought voting would be a great idea, I decided to
write a new system, instead of trying to get OCS the way we want it to
be (after I've been looking at the source code).

The idea was to write a simple system that does what we need. The basic
system was written in a very short time, afterwards I made some minor
changes. It's easy to change as the code base is that small. (Almost)
whenever something was needed, it wasn't a hassle to implement it.

Therefore it's an unfinished/raw that kind of works, but might need some
tweaks.

But now to your questions:
Ricardo Pinho wrote:
> On the other hand, for the sake of transparency, users should know how
> voting is going on!
>
> Why shouldn't the user be informed about the voting rank or score?

Do I understand correctly that you'd like to see the results (the
current score) of the presentations? I think this would lead to too much
bias.

> Why should you impose to the users the order of abstracts? Let the user
> chose the order: By Title, Author, Rank/Score, Tags, etc.
> Why shouldn't all the abstracts show in one single page? (it's only text!)
> Why don't you list only the title, and popup the abstract text when
> users click on the title?
> ...etc

Good ideas, this should be implemented if the system is used next year,
too (except for the Rank/Score, see answer to the previous question).

> Just some ideas... and Congratulations for the good work!

Thanks.

Cheers,
  Volker

[1] http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs