judging flame off competitions

I have never been to a flame off so take this for what it's worth. The Redbull x fighters judging is a great system for that sport and it seems to me that you could apply it pretty easily into your judging process.

The FMX culture is very similar to the piper culture. It all started "out of the view of the main stream" and is based on counter culture. the process of judging could so easily be applied to glass.

Now that said you still have people who are subjective judging. The twist is that you have a person not judging over all, but judging on the execution of a certain aspect of the peice? The judging is open because he is assigning a number value to the piece. This is added to the number values of several other catagorys done by different judges. The sum total is the score the piece got!

You select Judges based not on their name but on their speciality for a catagory. This takes the high pressure off the judges. They can focus on what they are best trained for.

Here is the cool part! This evens out the playing field for people with different strengths. A great example of this is how last year a guy didn't get his bike to the event until the day of the event. What this means is he really didn't have much time to get used to the track. This meant that he was not comfortable pulling back flip tricks off of jumps he wasn't familiar with. He decided to just go out and execute less technical tricks but do them so well that he scored in other catagory's...and it worked! He beat i guy who was pulling backflip combo tricks. It was a total shock when he won the round. Looking back at it though you can clearly see how he did legitimately win when you look at the performance as a whole...and isn't a piece of glass art a performance in itself?

Linkiedoodledoo

~Hope this helps you

Maybe try to mix the experience level on the judging panel. Say you have three people, one well known person, someone with median experience, and a newbie. That sort of takes some of the schmooze factor or name recognition out of the mix. People would be less able to vote for friends without the established relationships clouding things. Might someone vote for Salt (as an example) just to try to get on his good side? Maybe. If they don't have a clue who Salt is, however, then that's out of the picture.

As for the people's choice end. You've got a slew of smart folks around here. Each person gets a ballot with a qr code on it on entry. That gets scanned with a camera phone and flagged in a database (you don't even need to match them to a person, just the fact that the card's been used). No valid code, no vote. The only headache becomes printing the ballots since you're not making unique ones rather than making one and tossing it in a photocopier. Have the url point to a php page with the identifier and it can self flag on the back end (i.e. yoursever.com/logvote.php?id=12345)

The marker X idea's easier, but less geeky :)