Paul Bourke wrote:
> For those who have already contributed to the 2006 Short Code Competition
> and to those who plan to contribute ..... I had planned for the entrants to
> simply send in their votes, I tabulate them and announce the winners, I
> can obviously still do this.
> 
> However I was wondering if there were some other more interesting ways of
> handling the voting. How about a private newsgroup on this server where the
> entrants (who were the only ones with initial access) discussed the entries
> and tried to come to some concensus. This assumes someone who has managment
> control of the povray news server is prepared to set this up for us.
> Do you think this would work? Result in chaos, fights, bullying, ... or
> might be a nice transparent / fun way of deciding on the rankings.
> -------------------------------------
> P a u l   B o u r k e
> http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/
> 
> 
I think that voting is an good, rough-and-ready path to concensus.

The problem that I have always had with voting is that the result 
necessarily involves a ranking. Such a ranking is an artifical contruct 
and infers that a consistency and granularitly of aesthetic 
discrimination is possible beyond what I believe makes sense.

But this has a saving grace, that the ultimately the outcome must be 
taken with a "Grain of Salt", and in this light everyone gets to save 
face.  So I think the equal and anonymous vote is still the most 
trustworthy approach.

As I have always maintained about these voted on contests, they serve to 
provide a focus with an outcome we can accept, and in the meantime a lot 
of interesting art gets made and viewed.

I think if one could delineate a particular problem with voting, then 
maybe an alternative could be invented to avoid that problem.  But I 
have yet to see any case made convincingly.

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