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Getting more people to vote during demoparties

category: parties [glöplog]
plaf: I think this is echoed pretty well for all types of compos (perhaps with the demo compo being an excepting, simply due to the fact that it's usually one of the latest compos run): the time between watching the compo and voting / having the ability to vote needs to come down.
added on the 2013-08-20 10:59:46 by gloom gloom
Aside from having to open your votesystem to the internet for 2/3/4G users to be able to access it through their own mobile network providers.

A UMTS cell with all users getting the least possible bandwidth, will provide for roughly 150-200 users with active data streams. So if you were able to provide a single cell at a party (they're expensive as HELL!) it would cover most regular sized parties. Larger parties would of course have to get more cells or provide different technology.
added on the 2013-08-20 11:02:02 by Punqtured Punqtured
What about glöps for party votes ?

1) register at the partymeister
2) voluntarily fill an additional textfield with your pouet ID
3) collect "extra miles" (i.e. glöps) by voting on party- releases
4) either update immediately or via cronjob with pouet rdbms
5) ?
6) Profit !
7) more coup de coeur options :D
added on the 2013-08-20 11:02:49 by d0DgE d0DgE
Quote:
Aside from having to open your votesystem to the internet for 2/3/4G users to be able to access it through their own mobile network providers.

But that's something that could be solved quite easily with central hosting for Partymeister or whatnot and synced down through a single connection if one has bandwidth issues. It would be way smarter than to connect everyone locally directly.

Quote:
A UMTS cell with all users getting the least possible bandwidth, will provide for roughly 150-200 users with active data streams. So if you were able to provide a single cell at a party (they're expensive as HELL!) it would cover most regular sized parties. Larger parties would of course have to get more cells or provide different technology.


People don't turn off their data connection when they go to The Gathering, and that place has 6000+ mobile phones: all with working data connection. The same for Solskogen - the other end of the spectrum. 150-ish people, no real issue here either. Plus: it's not like all participants are going to storm onto the 3G network to vote - this would be an addition to that: another option. Many people will still continue to use their computers (like 89 did this year).

Again: "the mobile network bottlenecks makes mobile voting impossible / a problem" is simply incorrect in many, many ways. :)
added on the 2013-08-20 11:07:47 by gloom gloom
Quote:
People don't turn off their data connection when they go to The Gathering, and that place has 6000+ mobile phones: all with working data connection.

Considering the location I find that perfectly feasible. You'd think a major hall like that has some precautions. Solskogen I don't know -never been there.

But again: keeping up the infrastructure (or even having decent internet access) can be hard for smaller parties.

If anecdotal evidence is worth something: a while back the Fronteers congress was going on and the WiFi was kind of iffy and a lot of people had laptops, tablets and phones (usually all of the above) congesting both the event's WiFi *and* the antennas in the neighborhood. We literally created a black hole in the centre of Amsterdam's mobile connectivity. Not every location is as lucky as yours.
added on the 2013-08-20 12:04:14 by Shifter Shifter
shifter: Of course - coverage isn't perfect everywhere (and yes: this year we had a kick ass tech team with kick ass hardware who made the best WLAN I think I've ever experienced), but I just don't think possible coverage-issues is reason enough _not_ to simply slap a light-weight CSS-skin on the voting page, and allow for login via SceneID or something. It can only help.

Reading this thread, I get the strong impression that the time between when a compo is shown and when (and where) voting is possible is the one place to invest some time in with the biggest chance of affecting the outcome.
added on the 2013-08-20 12:51:58 by gloom gloom
Personally, by the time I've just watched the compos at a party I probably dont have my PC set up and it's probably pretty late, so I'm very easily distracted from voting. :) As a result I very rarely vote at parties.
I'd really need to be able to do it on my phone using a mobile web page accessible via wifi & 3g (3g for when the wifi is dead - but with very low data use, 3g abroad costs me money per mb).
Additionally id really like to do the fiddly annoying part of entering your votekey into the page at some earlier point in time, link it to e.g. my scene ID and then log in with that - or preferably log in earlier and stay logged in - so all i have to do is go to my phone browser (party page probably already open), go to the compo and select some values.
added on the 2013-08-20 13:19:48 by smash smash
That's my ideal solution as well. I must choke-hold our local Hungarian compo-system master and see what we can come up with.
added on the 2013-08-20 13:31:43 by gloom gloom
Any party worth their salt today gives you the votekey when you've arrived and probably quite a bit more sober than you will be late at night.

As for the mobile CSS, this is the first time there's demand for it, so it's nothing unsolvable, just takes those extra few minutes to make one.
added on the 2013-08-20 14:03:41 by Gargaj Gargaj
Btw, Assembly has those hallway screens with demoshows at night - why not do something like that for showing the compo entries or some hilights to remind which was which? Could be a good "preview" solution for parties where everyone streaming a video would be a problem - and nice for the mobile users who want to minimize their data usage. Maybe even outside. Though it would, of course, require video captures or at least screenshots of all the prods.
added on the 2013-08-20 14:16:44 by msqrt msqrt
Quote:
I probably dont have my PC set up and it's probably pretty late, so I'm very easily distracted from voting.


That's why voting terminals are useful. At Outline we sometimes set up a couple of clunky netbooks with a full screen browser and I've seen desktops at Evoke serving the same purpose before. Mind you, they're a pain to set up ad hoc and it's extra hardware to worry about -but it helps!
added on the 2013-08-20 14:51:46 by Shifter Shifter
I saw some feeble gainsaying toward my simple

Quote:
paper vote form + beer when handing it in


idea.

The points were:

a) that drunk voters wouldn't be able to write clearly. Naturally you'd just print out a form from the voting system, where you put an x in one of the 1...10 star boxes.

b) that orgas wouldn't have time to print the papers. Again, they come from the voting system, so it's just the printing time after each compo deadline when all entries are in. I'd say the printing is done in the time it takes to prepare the first entry for the bigscreen.

You could even announce "Do you have your votesheets? We won't start the compo until you do!!"

-~-

For real, this is the best you can do. If people don't vote when it's this simple and there's a motivation, they're simply not interested in voting or too lazy. This you can only address outside the party itself and before it is to take place.

Bring a printer. Make scener put x in a box during compo. And you get all votes possible.
added on the 2013-08-21 11:39:40 by Photon Photon
Quote:
I'd say the printing is done in the time it takes to prepare the first entry for the bigscreen.


I'd say that too, except that from many years of experience with printers, the reality would be something more like:

- "Windows can't connect to the printer." Oh, why not? It was working 10 minutes ago ffs! Much fucking around and multiple reboots later, and you're desperately trying to download a new driver over the party's super flaky internet link.

- The crowd are getting impatient, because the compo should have started 5 minutes back.

- Finally, it's talking to the printer, and happily telling you that there's a paper jam. You open it up, gently pull that fucker out, and find a piece has torn off. It's somewhere deep in the centre of the printer. You can't find it.

- The crowd have gone quiet.. this is worrying. They're building some kind of wooden structure at the back of the hall. Well, so long as they're keeping themselves busy.

- You finally get that bit of paper out, and printing starts! But wait, it's really faint and you can hardly read the bit in the middle of the page. Wtf? It's a brand new toner!

- The crowd have finished whatever they were building. It's a big wooden frame, with a rope hanging from it...
added on the 2013-08-21 12:16:11 by psonice psonice
Offering incentives for voting - beer, glowsticks, scenepoints - is a shitty idea.

We're not *actually* trying to increase the number of votes here. Our real aim is to make the final results more representative of the viewers' opinions. 'Number of votes' is just a convenient measurable proxy for that… but once you bring rewards into the mix, the two become disconnected, and you end up optimising for that number and ONLY that number.


If you reward hospitals for reducing the time patients have to wait before seeing a nurse, you will end up with hospitals employing a nurse on front desk just to say hello to everyone coming through the door.

If you reward schools for getting children to eat more vegetables, you will end up with ketchup reclassified as a vegetable.

If you reward programmers by number of lines of code written,
they
will
start
writing
like
this.

If you give people an incentive for voting at parties, they will fill the form with any old crap to get their free beer.
added on the 2013-08-21 12:19:26 by gasman gasman
Photon, when's the last time you organized a party?
added on the 2013-08-21 12:22:23 by Gargaj Gargaj
There we go with the made up problems, exaggerations, and accusations. Sorry for sounding confident, but if you want votes this is the method to get the most votes.

If you don't want to use this method, then don't. But don't see problems when my suggestion is one that REMOVES problems.

Problems printing: Are you kidding? When was the last time you had problems printing anything your printer at home? I think you're confusing it with network printers. Counteraccusation: have you been to a party that had connection problems with its browser-based voting system, ever?

Crap votes: A blank vote is a crap vote, because he voted 5/10 for all the demos. A completely filled out form extremely biased to ones own group and friends and names you heard of before is a crap vote. You need to define what a quality vote looks like, and it's the orga's job to reject any votes they deem 'crap'. Note also that we don't see much vote scrutinization by orgas today, even though they often reserve the right to reject crap votes. This must work before anyone has opinions on or definitions of what constitutes a fair vote.

A small reward is somehow bad: No. Again with the exaggerations. You're comparing affecting people's wages on which they support themselves and/or their families with 1 beverage. I herd the beer clown on BFP (check photos) distracted all the coders/artists/musicians on BFP because all they could think of was when he'd come back with the next free beer. No. Give them nice partystickers as reward, or stamp their wrist and don't let them leave the party if they lack one, I don't care. It's just a small, nice, and not very fancy motivator.

Gargaj: I organized one demoparty in 1989, and a few lan parties in 2001-2003, none of which had voting. I take it you either a) have zero problems with voting on the parties you organize, or b) that you think my system won't bring you more votes (motivation), or c) that everyone who isn't a party organizer has zero clues about what votes are, how they work, or how to organize anything or collect information.

-~-

For myself as voter, I've found it amateurish that I have to bring pen and paper myself. I don't see how anyone could put fair votes on 40 songs in a music compo 2-3 hours later without it, and party organizers of all people should smack their forehead and say, "Oh! Of course! That's the way it really is - they either have to make notes themselves or risk forgetting in time for voting. Why haven't I seen this? We must remedy this at once!"

The point with the printed forms (and the ONLY difference from what we have today) is that you DON'T have to rely on drunk voters writing unclearly, getting groups wrong or relying on memory until it's voting time. That's the only difference from today.

Sorry for typing much, I find it strange with so much resistance to, and a need for such detailing of, a not particularly deep or difficult to achieve suggestion.
added on the 2013-08-21 13:33:57 by Photon Photon
Photon: problems with my own printer? Yes, regularly. Actually network printers tend to be WAY more reliable.

But after many years in IT support, all I can say is that I wouldn't even consider relying on printing voting forms in the short gap between getting the last of the entries and the start of the compo, if i was an organiser. Absolutely no way :D
added on the 2013-08-21 13:37:52 by psonice psonice
photon, as an active party organiser during the last 13 years, managing a substantial amount of compos at evoke, i can only second gargaj and psonice here. there are absolutely no time resources to deal with paper votesheets. the idea is completely ridiculous. when exactly are we supposed to print AND count the votesheets? and why exactly this should be any better than network-based voting? (which is simply superior not only for the effort-reducing on the orga side, but also due to the possibility of screenshots and snippets, the possibility of visitors to edit/alter their votes before deadline etc.).

the rewards thing is another thing, and i'm agreeing with gasman here, but that's another discussion.
added on the 2013-08-21 13:42:23 by dipswitch dipswitch
and don't get me wrong, i DO remember the time of paper votesheets - but parties switched to votedisks and lateron to network voting for good reasons. advocating for paper votesheets in 2013 is like suggesting to get rid of all the cars and planes, and move around in horse carts.
added on the 2013-08-21 13:46:40 by dipswitch dipswitch
Yeah, i agree with gasman on the rewards thing. Although it'd be cool to sponsor the voting, giving free beer to people voting for your group. ;)
added on the 2013-08-21 13:46:48 by psonice psonice
Tallying the votes is truly laborious (have you ever tried?).

Would YOU want to be the person who spends five hours counting the votes after the compo while everyone else is having fun? Would be be the person who checks the result, ie. does it again? And if it was me counting the votes (or someone else), would you trust my honesty? Would you trust me to count all the votes and not just the ones I like? What if someone loses filled vote sheets at some point and they get discovered ten minutes before the prizegiving? How would you prevent people from filling multiple sheets, or making copies of them?

Of course, computerized voting can be rigged as well, but I'd much rather trust a machine in this case.
added on the 2013-08-21 13:47:48 by Preacher Preacher
Not that it's important, but...
Quote:

Problems printing: Are you kidding? When was the last time you had problems printing anything your printer at home? I think you're confusing it with network printers. Counteraccusation: have you been to a party that had connection problems with its browser-based voting system, ever?

Last week.
Quote:
I take it you either a) have zero problems with voting on the parties you organize, or b) that you think my system won't bring you more votes (motivation), or c) that everyone who isn't a party organizer has zero clues about what votes are, how they work, or how to organize anything or collect information.

That just about sums it up yeah. Feel free to organize your own party with paper-voting, then we'll see how well it fares compared to the parties organized by people who have more or less a decade of experience.
added on the 2013-08-21 13:52:11 by Gargaj Gargaj
On the topic of liability of printers, I'd definitely have to go with a gut feeling, that it's probably a bad idea, to the exact same reasons psonice stated.

We all just have to come to terms with the fact, that we're able to launch a rocket into space, acurately control it to fly some 50-60 million kilometers to deploy a super high tech surface vehicle, conduct science from 55 million kilometers away and have it transmit data back to us, but that we still haven't figured out how to create a machine, that can manage the advanced task of picking up one sheet of paper, drop some ink or whatever on it, and pass it back. Printers are the new space tech!
added on the 2013-08-21 13:54:48 by Punqtured Punqtured

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