This year we’ve revamped how we do voting in competitions, and we thought we’d explain those changes to you so you could get a bit of insight in how we do it now!
The voting is divided up into a few different stages. The first stage involves going through the different rooms that have been submitted, taking pictures of all of them, copying the room descriptions, and placing a flag in the room. The person who placed the flag in your room did not necessarily vote on your room.
The second stage is the initial voting stage, each room gets voted on twice by two different staff in this stage, if they get a yes by either staff, they move onto the next stage, otherwise this is where the room will drop out. A good thing to note is that if any staff members may know the person who made a certain room, they wouldn’t vote on it and would leave it to another staff member.
The third stage involved a third staff going in and voting on any rooms that had both a yes and a no, if they got a yes in this stage, they would be put forward to the final stage.
The final stage is where all of the remaining rooms are put into a document (without the room owners, but with the picture and description visible) and they are all voted on with a scale of 1 to 10 for the three categories (creativity, theme and overall). All staff are asked to vote here, and if they know the person who made the room by sight of the room, they are asked to abstain from the vote for that particular room.
At the end of this, all of the votes from the final stage are tallied up and that’s where we get our winners.
The reason for the changes is because in previous years, it was one judge who decided if your room went onto the later stages or not, and we thought this way would be more fair and we would be more likely to get all of the best rooms through, without letting any of them fall through the cracks. Also, in older competitions, only HOSTs would be able to vote on rooms and each room would be assigned to a single HOST, who would decide if the room went through or not.
The voting is divided up into a few different stages. The first stage involves going through the different rooms that have been submitted, taking pictures of all of them, copying the room descriptions, and placing a flag in the room. The person who placed the flag in your room did not necessarily vote on your room.
The second stage is the initial voting stage, each room gets voted on twice by two different staff in this stage, if they get a yes by either staff, they move onto the next stage, otherwise this is where the room will drop out. A good thing to note is that if any staff members may know the person who made a certain room, they wouldn’t vote on it and would leave it to another staff member.
The third stage involved a third staff going in and voting on any rooms that had both a yes and a no, if they got a yes in this stage, they would be put forward to the final stage.
The final stage is where all of the remaining rooms are put into a document (without the room owners, but with the picture and description visible) and they are all voted on with a scale of 1 to 10 for the three categories (creativity, theme and overall). All staff are asked to vote here, and if they know the person who made the room by sight of the room, they are asked to abstain from the vote for that particular room.
At the end of this, all of the votes from the final stage are tallied up and that’s where we get our winners.
The reason for the changes is because in previous years, it was one judge who decided if your room went onto the later stages or not, and we thought this way would be more fair and we would be more likely to get all of the best rooms through, without letting any of them fall through the cracks. Also, in older competitions, only HOSTs would be able to vote on rooms and each room would be assigned to a single HOST, who would decide if the room went through or not.
Much appreciated.
