Followups-to: irtc.stills

 I know a few people have wondered at how the topics are choosen.
Some complain that the topics for successive rounds are sometimes
closely related. I just read an email in the IRTC mailing list from
Bill Marrs (IRTC ADMIN) that explains the process in some detail.

Thought you all might be interested in this...


Someone asked:

> By the way, not complaining, but am I the only one who thought that
>"Wilderness" is a little too close to "Nature"? I suppose there is
> a limited number of unique themes though.


Bill replyed:

Actually, there are tons of great topic ideas coming from the topic 
suggestion system:

http://www.irtc.org/perl/topics.pl

Check it out - sign up, vote on topics, suggest some topics if you like.  I 
haven't been pushing people to use the system for a while because I'm happy 
with the topics it's churning out, but it never hurts to have more people 
using it.


I do a fairly quick check for recent/similar topics, but I don't look back 
further than a year or so.  "Nature" happened in May-June 1998 (2 years 
ago).  I think most people don't mind repeats of similar ideas if the topic 
is a good/popular one.

I try to just let the topic suggestion system pick the topic itself, 
without my intervening.  Thus the topic with the best average votes 
wins.  I will sometimes hold back a topic if it's too similar to a 
previous/recent one or if some other reason pops up, but in practice, I've 
very rarely had to do this.

"Sea", the new topic is similar to "Water" and old Matt Kruse competition 
topic, I think.  Still, it's hopefully a good broad topic one with lots of 
possibilities.  We did have one admin question whether it may be too 
similar to wilderness, but in the end we decided it was different enough 
and just went with it.

At this point, there seem to be some more original topics coming up in the 
pipeline (though, that could change as we get more topics/votes).  If 
people are feeling that a more original topic is needed, I could make sure 
one or two come up next.  I don't have to pick the topic with the best 
vote.  Picking #2, 3, 4, or 5 on the list is about the same (they have very 
close averages) - thus I could manipulate the natural flow to ensure better 
variety.  Probably a mix of "classic" or similar topics and very new ones 
would be best.  I could try harder for mix it up perhaps.

-bill

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Ken wrote:
> 
> Actually, there are tons of great topic ideas coming from the topic
> suggestion system:
> 
> http://www.irtc.org/perl/topics.pl
> 
> Check it out - sign up, vote on topics, suggest some topics if you
> like.  I haven't been pushing people to use the system for a while
> because I'm happy with the topics it's churning out, but it never
> hurts to have more people using it.

I'm working through the topics right now, and most of them could
easily be the basis for a Rusty animation.  The rest suck.

Regards,
John
-- 
ICQ: 46085459

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