Not suggesting we need to change (for reference only) ...

[chillibutts]

Hi all

Was thinking about this in the car on the way to work, and looked it up. Posting it here only as a point of reference for next year.

How does the Oscar nomination and voting process work?

Nominations vote

The nomination process commences when each of the 5,777 members of AMPAS, or the Academy, are asked to select their favourite eligible ¹ films – usually five – from the preceding year.

The Academy is split into 15 branches, which represent the various aspects of the film production process, and include actors, directors, writers, producers, and visual effects branches, to name a few.

Branch members are only able to nominate “in-house” however. The choices made by branch members, which are ranked preferentially from one to five, are sent to accounting and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who then count the selections – manually – and after much sifting of paper, eventually determine the top five choices – or nominations – in each Oscar category.

To be in the running a film must receive at least one number one ranking from a member, or it is eliminated from the count. PwC go through all the votes, or selections, short-listing the top five number one ranked films in each category.

Taking the Animated Feature Film category as an example, here’s how the nomination selection process might work. This year the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch of the AMPAS has 340 members. PwC divides this number by 6, which equals about 56. To make the grade therefore, a film must secure at least 56 number one votes from members of this branch. For example 63 members might have selected “Coraline” as their first choice. Another 62 might have chosen “Fantastic Mr. Fox” as their first choice, another 61 “The Princess and the Frog”, 60 “The Secret of Kells”, and finally 57 “Up”. Any other animated features that may have been voted as a top choice by members of the branch are now eliminated, as they did not receive enough votes to make the top five in the category.

It gets complicated – sometimes very complicated – however if five movies do not reach the minimum vote threshold, and this is where the preferential voting system comes into play.

They [the PwC team] then look at the piles still left on the table and get rid of the one with the smallest amount of votes, redistributing them to other piles ranked on the 2nd favourite film on the ballots. If the number 2 choice has already been eliminated then they go to the 3rd choice and so on. Once that’s taken place they count again, if a film hits the magic number it’s taken off the table and is a nominee.

Final Voting and electing the winners

The final voting process is relatively similar to the nomination process.

Once nominations have been finalised, Academy members are sent ballot papers, and again using a preferential voting system, make their selections.

At this stage though, just two people at PwC are involved in counting the votes, and they remain the only ones to know the final results, until the winners are announced on Oscars night

 

[sef]

Hi Darren

Nice piece of reference work. Similar procedures are used to vote for the Olympic host city and even a new pope (I wonder if there is a wiki on that).

I am currently collating all comments / critiques / questions wrt the 'rules' and I am planning on creating a questionnaire and ask for feedback.

Hopefully Audra can show me how to create the questionnaire in Google. We can catch two birds with one stone as the acquired skills will help us setup the voting sheets for next year when you and I are takinng over the organisation.

Questions thus far are:

• Do we want nominations and final votes separate or do we vote straight away?
• Do we suggest the top fave getters or do we make the nomination sheet fully open?
• Do we limit number of categories in which a cache can be voted on (if so how many)
• Do we limit number of categories in which a cache can be nominate on (if so how many)
• Do we have an outstanding hider award?
• What is the main criterium (rank 1 to 6)
• Do we have a cacher of the year
• What are the criteria
• Should we merge earth/letter/wherigo
• Suggestions for new categories
• Should only new events be eligible
• Should all nominations be on the voting form or just the most nominated?
• Do you have to have found a cache before voting?

[audleigh]

Since we're kicking ideas around and getting them documented for next year I would like the original intent of the awards to be clearly stated.  Processes when not guidedby a common goal can cause a really great idea to become derailed and ultimately disappear. The awards have disappeared before -- I do not know why nor have ideas as to why.  The goal is important to prevent it from disappearing again.

I believe (and flipper & co and skippy have never balked at this statement) that the awards should be designed to encourage variety and creativity for/from all South Australian Geocachers. 

Read: it is not about "improving" Geocaches or Geocachers because that is a subjective opinion and very difficult to prevent personal agendas from becoming the driving force. By encouraging variety and creativity -- good always comes from that even when we have a year of very lame caches (folks see them as lame and then decide they can do better and win the award next year).

Since it is our baby and you guys are taking it over, we ask that you please hold the core goal sacred.  We'll be involved with helping the event planning and validation duties as needed, we'll just be a bit busy with Mega. (Read: we're not abandoning the project, just letting you guys drive :-) ).  

And if improvements mean that others volunteer and our help isn't needed then maybe some day we'll step away completely -- though Mrs Flipper has way too much fun designing the Pathtags :-). It'll be near impossible to shake her :-)

That's my two cents and I'm glad the two of you are up for making changes to the process. I wanted to poll for suggestions but never did.  Change is good!  If nothing else, it will keep SA Geocachers guessing!!

The google form is quite easy, though a tad manual.  I can show you in 15 minutes how it works. It's not technical at all.

Cheers,

Audra

[chillibutts]

Bit worried about the words "..you guys are taking it over"... wit wat? news to me :)

Anyway, I am still a big advocate for using an online survey tool. I quickly knocked up a couple of example questions for you guys to look at:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1228893/SAGA-questions

Check it out, I know how to use this one! (as opposed to google docs)

[audleigh]

I'm perfectly ok with using a different survey form.

Will voters have to create an account with the hosting site?  And are the results stored in a spreadsheet or csv file?

[Skippy.geocacher]

I got my votes in

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 19, 2013, at 10:51 AM, chillibutts <chill...@iprimus.com.au> wrote:

[skippy.geocacher]

I have an idea for how to greatly reduce the popularaty on the caches nominated on each category.

If everybody only choose which Cache they what to nominate for the year but not in the catorgory, when it comes to voting let them choose which category they want o place that cache into.

this will then determine which is the bestest cache in that category ( bestest is a word )

Sent from my iLaying back on my iCouch