Hello,

 I find it is an intriguing question to pose about who is allowed to
enter/judge what level of images to IRTC, as it addresses the accuracy of
the voting system.  Though I, too, am disappointed in some of the
low-quality entries in the last few rounds, I do not find a problem with
the IRTC system.



 I find any negative affect is only temporary - about 2 weeks at most.  Once
the judges go through the images and vote, results equal image quality.
Any "quality/ability based contest/judging" will show identical results!

contestants) will create a new set of problems, worse than the ones we have
now.  Who is going to manage the extra workload?  How do we rank people?
What if we feel we are misplaced?  On what criteria are we to pre-judge an
artist's work in order to place them in categories?  Will the separated
contest protect us from cheating?  And so on.
 These cost-benefit analyses suggest not doing anything about lousy images.

 But there is a concern for sabotage.  20 bad entries could rate themselves
highly amongst themselves - or, more likely, they could all be from the
same person who is using pseudonyms in order to push votes to his or her
own image - and overwhelm the votes based on more objective criteria.
 This may be significant if actually practiced.  Which begs the follow-up


 I think probably not.  The expectation in this contest is that it really
does not mean anything.  At this point, it is not the Noble Prize in
Graphics, so does not have any *reason* to cheat, not even for notoriety.
The only people who would have a *vested* interest in cheating are - all of
you!  That's right, the people who submit images (give or take) are the
people who you are trying to impress, and very few others in the world.  If
you cheat, all of the other artists are will call you a cheat, and have the
image(s) removed.  The solution to the problem will probably present itself
if such sabotage ever occurs.  If the dynamic of IRTC changes in the future
(if awards become significant or valuable), this may have to be
reconsidered.

 BTW, the only way to tell if such sabotage occurs is to use statistical
analysis to discern if there is some pattern that is abnormal.  This is for
the IRTC mgmt to figure out, though, since they are the only ones with
access to the complete data set.

 What else can we do beyond asking people to be straightforward with their
entries?  Laws do not only set limits negatively, but also positively.  If
we start to create rules around the expectation that people will cheat, I
do not see there as being any truly positive effect.
 Besides, I actually think having unqualified people voting does more damage
to the fairness of the results than any poor imagery, or any cheating -
good artists or programmers are not automatically good judges.  At the same
time, I would not ask for any qualifying criteria to be met, since (true)
democracy provides more protection for fairness in general than
(qualitatively defined) aristocracy.


later,
Neal.

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