Hello guys

I wanted to give you a first feedback regarding the organization of WLA and in particular the organization of the jury and of the global vote.

The reason why I offer this feedback now is because I read in the local teams feedback that the votes should be more transparent.

I could not agree more...

I should however also outline that the photo selection is one of the contest element that is very bad for my health.

Last year, we had no special tools but 6000 images to rank. We did that in several parts, but mostly using google docs. I spent a HUGE amount of time (and when I say HUGE, I really mean HUGE) managing the images and the selections proposed by the jury. It was truely awful.

This year, I was more optimistic because I had been told of the Jury Tool made by Ilya. In terms of jury, we selected images in 3 rounds (the Community picture was a fourth round).

The first round was on the Jury Tool with only wikimedians. It worked well generally, except that - I had to ask Ilya *many* times to set up the tool - one jury member was not very reactive

The second round was again on the Jury Tool, with all jury members. It worked more or less ok, except that - I had to ask Ilya many, many, many, many, many times to set up the tool - some jury members were not reactive - some jury members voted only for a selection of images, which somehow does not work very well in selecting the best images

Which means that at the end of the second round, there was no clear winner

And the problem is that this tool allows only two roles. The admin role see everything. The jury role sees only his votes. Which is not very satisfactory in terms of transparency.

The third round ended up on Google Docs again. Because after waiting for Ilya to set up the tool for MANY weeks, I GAVE UP. We could have done the third round on Commons (pretty much in the same way than the community vote), but then... we would have needed to train our non wikimedia jury to actually edit Commons. Which is nice... but probably beyond what they were ready to do.

In short... the vote was a nightmare in 2014. And it put me in murderous mood in 2015.

So I am still looking for an acceptable way of judging 8000+ images in - a reasonable timeframe - in a transparent fashion - without spending HOURS of time on it

I have opened a page on the IdeaLab to discuss the Jury Tool. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/WLX_Jury_Tool_:_improved_tool... At least... I discover that I was not the only one victim of a non-reactive developer :)

But let me just say that unless the tool is improved during the year (or unless a new tool is made available), the way pictures are selected will have to be changed dramatically. Maybe it means we should stop working with an external jury ? Maybe it means we should first select images at the local level then at the global level as WLM is doing (but then giving no price for countries with no local team ?)

I dunno. But we have an issue there. I am interested to know how people involved in other contests actually do.

Florence