We spent a lot of time thinking about how to keep Node.js Knockout scoring fun, fair, and exciting. Here’s how it’s going to work:
Entries will be judged on a 1-5 scale across 4 dimensions:
Additionally, a Popularity score will be calculated based on the number of votes a entry gets from the general public.
In order to ensure all reviews are anchored similarly, we ask that people try to grade along a curve with a mean of 3.5.
All voting will take place between 03:00 GMT on Monday, August 29 and 0:00 GMT on Tuesday, September 6.
There will be three groups of voters:
We have an amazing and diverse panel of expert judges who are volunteering their time to provide thoughtful feedback on your weekend’s work.
Each expert judge will be asked to review an initial batch of 5-10 entries. After they do their initial batch, judges will be encouraged to review a handful more of the top entries that pique their interest. Experts will not be allowed to vote for people who they know.
The hope is that this will allow every entry to get at least 2-3 thoughtful expert reviews and that the best entries will get enough reviews that the law of large numbers ensures fairness.
Contestants are going to have a much bigger role in the judging than last year. Contestants will be responsible for determining 40% of a teams overall score.
In order for contestant scoring to be succesful, we need lots of contestants to vote. If somebody on another team votes on your entry, we encourage you to vote on their entry as well.
To ensure fairness and civility, please remember that votes are attached to your public GitHub profile, and that other contestants will be reviewing your entry. Try to be as fair and balanced to others as you expect them to be to you. Additionally, we reserve the right to disqualify teams from the contest for inappropriate or unfair judging behavior (as determined by the organizers).
Contestants will not be allowed to vote on their own entries (because it would give teams with more members an unfair advantage).
General public voters will not score on 4 dimensions, but will instead simply vote up the entry. These votes will contribute exclusively to the entry’s popularity and overall score.
Any member of the general public will be allowed to vote, but Facebook login will be required. You are encouraged to get as many people as possible to vote for your work, as these votes form the entrity of the popularity component of your team’s score.
A team’s score will be determined by combining the expert judge score and the contestant scores for each dimension along with the popularity component derived from each entry’s public vote count.
The overall score will be the average of all 5 components (utility / fun, design, innovation, completeness and popularity).
There will be the following 7 prize categories:
A team may only win one prize and will earn the highest prize (in the above rank order) for which it qualifies, opening its spot in the running for lower prizes to the next most qualified team.
See the prizes page for a list of prizes.
This is a competition for fun. The honor code applies: we’re trusting you to do the honorable thing.
We have implemented a number of mechanisms to detect and to eliminate ballot stuffing, and we will be have a zero tolerance policy towards cheating. If you are provably caught cheating, you will be disqualified immediately, be banned from all future events, and generally be thought of as a bad person by all of the organizers and potentially many, many, more people. Trust us, it’s not worth the risk.
There’s no system of voting that will make everybody happy. Our decisions are based on lessons from dozens of other competitions and we believe that they’re going to make for a great Node.js Knockout.
But it’s important to remember at the end of the day, even if you don’t win, you’ll still have had a great time, have built something awesome, and have gotten a ton of exposure for your idea.