Vote to allocate media funding percentages

We have implemented a new feature empowering voters to allocate percentages of a budget to competing websites/blogs at votermedia.org.

For some interesting examples, see these community pages:

Vancouver

UBC AMS (student union)

USA Investor Education

You can now vote at new Global Voter Media Platform

We've just released the first beta version of votermedia.org, where you can now vote on media that cover Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Iran, Microsoft, CBC etc etc. It's designed to have a page of voter-ranked media (blogs and others) for each voter community in the world. You can add new communities and new media to this voting system.

There's more explanation on the site's FAQ page, and in the paper "Global Voter Media Platform" at votermedia.org/publications.

Come and help reform our governments, corporations and other large organizations!

http://votermedia.org

Vancouver awards morphing to BC ranking

With the municipal elections behind us, the Vancouver Election Blog Awards will now become the British Columbia Politics Blog Ranking. Provincial election and referendum are are only 6 months away!

Check out the total awards won by each Vancouver blog from May through November 2008.

We are building a new scalable website platform for media/blog voting. To conserve time and funds for that, the B.C. blog ranking will not have awards for now, and will be updated monthly instead of weekly. The UBC blog awards will continue, at least through their election in late January 2009.

Vancouver awards update

I did the weekly tally update today -- see new ballot & blog links.

Vancouver election is this Saturday Nov 15! Be sure to vote.

After next Monday Nov 17, the Vancouver Election Blog Awards will change dramatically. I'll blog about it then.

So I'll accumulate this week's awards through next week, and pay them all out after that.

BTW I couldn't revive my PC that crashed a week ago, so last Tuesday I bought a Mac. Now learning how to set up and use this new hardware & software system...

Vancouver update

I did the weekly tally update today -- see new ballot & blog links.

With less than 2 weeks to the municipal elections, I'm preparing for the next stage of evolution of voter funded media system designs. The two-part ballot we used in the past week (funding vote for top ten, yes/no vote for the rest) was interesting, but difficult to tally and re-rank consistently.

So this week I'd like to try a very simple design: approval voting, much like at Digg.com.

My main computer crashed yesterday and is still down, so it's hard for me to update the votermedia website with today's tally results. I'll try to get to it soon.

Vancouver awards updated

In today’s vote count, Vancity Buzz took over first place, and newcomer re:place Magazine is in second. We’re also trying out a new ballot format – see ballot and blog links.

See also:
- cumulative awards & other info
- vote tally details & history

Vancouver awards updated today

As mentioned earlier, today only I’m deviating from the usual Monday weekly schedule for the Vancouver Election Blog Awards. We’ll be back on Mondays starting October 27.

Voters again rewarded five media/blog entrants, this time putting Vancity Buzz back in the money – see ballot for awards & links.

Vancouver awards update; skipping a week

I just tallied the votes for this week’s Vancouver Election Blog Awards. Lowering the award cap from $150 to $100 has shared the wealth a little further – 5 winners this week instead of 4. Beyond Robson remains in the lead; Only Magazine won its first award. See ballot and blog links.

With Thanksgiving next Monday, and me on a trip to New York October 18 to 25, I’m going to stretch out the next two award voting periods to a week and a half each. So next two tally updates will be Thursday October 16 and Monday October 27. Then we’ll be back on a weekly Monday schedule.

I’ll be meeting some of my old Wall Street buddies. We should have plenty to talk about…

Vancouver weekly blog awards; award ceiling

I just tallied the votes for this week’s Vancouver Election Blog Awards. The four winners are the same as last week, but awards have shifted a little – see ballot. Thank you all participants!

Going forward, you’ll see on the ballot that I decided to revert the award ceiling from $150 back down to the $100 that we were using through July 14. I think of the ceiling as training wheels which I’d like to remove eventually. In this early experimental stage of the blog awards, funding is limited to what I can afford. So publicity is limited, partly because the award pool doesn’t motivate enough publicity from the bloggers. As a result, our voter sample is probably not broad enough to be representative of all Vancouverites. But when I pitch for foundation funding, I’d like to show preliminary results that are more reflective of how the awards would work out with a broader voter sample.

To see what effect the ceiling had, I tried raising it for a while. Ideally, I’d like to give voters as much power as possible, including the freedom to allocate awards any way they want. But for now I think this bicycle is tilting too far, so I’ve lowered the training wheels back down.

By the way, we also plan to attract and retain more voters by building a new ballot with features like the latest headline from each media/blog.

I welcome your comments and suggestions on all this!

Vancouver Election Blog Awards weekly update

I've just tallied the votes for this past week. The awards came out the same as last week. So congratulations to prize winners Beyond Robson, The Tyee, David Eby and Frances Bula -- see ballot at votermedia.org/van. Thank you to all participants -- media/blogs and voters.

As usual, details of votes and award allocation method are in spreadsheets linked here.

I get the sense that I've been over-emphasizing the competitive aspect of voter funded media, so I changed the name from "Vancouver Election Blog Contest" to "Vancouver Election Blog Awards", took out the ranking numbers, and changed some of the wording on the ballot and the terms.

Vancouver contest weekly update

Voters lifted new entrant Beyond Robson straight to the #1 spot and $150, the highest weekly prize ever awarded since this contest began in May. Congratulations to them!

See latest rankings and awards on the current ballot at votermedia.org/van.

Some of our discussion from this earlier post is relevant to the current dramatic re-ranking.

Details of votes and award allocation method are on spreadsheets linked here.

Please welcome the next new contestant, added this week: Only Magazine.

Vancouver contest updates

The Tyee has regained first place in the Vancouver Election Blog Contest, as of today’s weekly vote tally. See current ranking on the ballot.

Welcome new contestant Beyond Robson!

The vote tallying method is explained here, with link to spreadsheet showing vote percentiles.

I’ve updated the contest terms to include a listing of the representative of each contestant.

Political debates at VPL

There are some interesting political debates coming up, to be held at the Vancouver Public Library main branch, on Wednesdays at 7:30 pm:

UPDATED: September 17: Resolved: THE MINIMUM WAGE SHOULD BE ELIMINATED
Arguing the AFFIRMATIVE:
MAUREEN BADER, BC Director, Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Arguing the NEGATIVE:
JIM SINCLAIR, President, BC Federation of Labour
[The carbon tax debate previously scheduled for this date "will re-surface in the near future".]

October 1: First Mayoral Debate -- Peter Ladner vs Gregor Robertson
Journalist panel includes Stephen Quinn, CBC Radio One, Alex G Tsakumis, 24 Hours/CTV Vancouver, and Frances Bula, Vancouver Magazine/Langara College

October 29: Second Mayoral Debate -- Peter Ladner vs Gregor Robertson
Journalist panel includes Stephen Quinn, CBC Radio One, Alex G Tsakumis, 24 Hours/CTV Vancouver, and Frances Bula, Vancouver Magazine/Langara College

November 12: "RESOLVED: SkyTrain is a costly mess; LRT is the only way to go." Speakers TBA

Full updated details here.

Is the Vancouver contest political/municipal enough?

These two comments on my August 25 post are worth quoting and following up in a new thread:

Chris said...

The results are turning more into a popularity contest then a reasonable measure of political blogs in Vancouver. Half of the blogs on the list have little or no political content, especially Vancouver municipal political content.

As much as I like Miss 604's blog, I can't remember the last time she wrote about anything regarding politics in Vancouver. The closest thing I can think of was a discussion of the smoking ban.

Same goes for Vancity Buzz.

The Vancouver Observer, Price Tags, and Paul Hilsdon have minimal municipal political content

Bill Tieleman and Walter Schultz focus provincial politics.

A general Vancouver blog like Beyond Robson or Metroblogging Vancouver has more political content then most of the blogs on the list.

August 25, 2008 2:41 PM

Raul (hummingbird604) said...

I am the newest addition to the roster, for which I'm grateful. As for political content, I would ask one question and point out to one thing.

1) Is the contest purely for political blogs? That wasn't my understanding.

2) I am in no way, shape or form justifying my blog or my inclusion in the ballot, but I do write about Vancouver's public policy issues, particularly environmental policy.

I think that having a variety of blogs allows for the experiment to take place. As a social scientist myself, I can see how the experiment is developing and I'm curious to see the outcome.

August 26, 2008 6:59 PM

Thanks Chris and Raul for taking up this important question. I agree with most of the points you made.

Two weeks ago I invited Beyond Robson to enter the contest, and we’re just sorting out who on their end should approve the entry and receive any award payments. Once that’s done I plan to invite Vancouver Metblogs, which seems to have a similar structure of platform provider aggregating independent bloggers.

The contest is designed to empower Vancouver voters to fund whatever they think serves their interests. My expectation is that they will want to support bloggers that give insight on municipal politics and policies, so I call it the “Vancouver Election Blog Contest”. But to keep this process democratic, the contest administrator should not impose that view by restricting entry to political blogs. This is partly to prevent political control by the adminstrator, and partly to keep the door open to other possible community benefits – e.g. see Will VFM Provide Consumer Info?

Here’s a relevant section of the contest terms:

We refer to contestants as “media” or “bloggers” and call this a blog contest based on what we think contestants will do, but we do not actually require contestants to act like media or be bloggers. This contest is designed to benefit the voting community, and many types of benefit are possible. We think contestants will win votes by providing such benefits as blogs, websites, newspapers and broadcasts giving insight on Vancouver civic issues, especially those decided by vote.

Likewise the question of regional focus (municipal, greater metropolitan, provincial) is left to the voters. Vancouver issues overlap so much with regional and provincial (transportation, education, environment, crime, you name it) that I wouldn’t know how to draw a dividing line. Right after the municipal election in November, I plan to morph it into a B.C. political blog contest and promote it to bloggers and voters province-wide, as a run-up to the B.C. election next May.

When assessing contest voter tendencies, it’s helpful to look not only at the current week’s ranking on the ballot, but also at the cumulative awards won so far. Current rankings fluctuate depending on who posted about the contest recently. The leader in cumulative awards is The Tyee, with serious in-depth coverage of politics and policy. And speaking of policy, some contestants may not discuss Vancouver’s election specifically, but give voters valuable insight into municipal issues, e.g. Price Tags on urban planning and Paul Hillsdon on transportation.

Nonetheless, Chris’s point that the voting results are like a popularity contest is still something to worry about. Marketing is not my forte. My main promotion strategy for attracting people to vote is to depend on the contestants to publicize it in their blogs. Most of them have mentioned it once or twice, but that’s about it. So we may not have expanded the voter pool much beyond the bloggers themselves and their friends. As a result, many of the votes may reflect loyalty to friends rather than the broader public interest. To some extent such biases cancel each other out, but I think some flavour of a popularity contest remains.

Part of the problem is the limited award pool. $300 a week is not much to support independent political media for a city the size of Vancouver. Bloggers may not find it worthwhile to promote their entries for a few extra dollars. So this may change in future if we can attract more funding.

But meanwhile there’s a lot we can do. A few days ago I finally learned how to mask the ballot’s super-long URL, so now I can encourage bloggers to link to the new short URL: http://votermedia.org/van. A ballot link that stays near the top of a blog, like those at Vancouver Manifesto and UBC Insider, would bring multiple benefits: more voting support for that contestant, knowledge of other blogs for their readers, and a broader voter base for the contest. So it’s not just a selfish plug. Better still, bloggers can recommend other contestants they consider particularly worthy, as Miss604 did in this post.

BTW I’m writing a paper on the overall rationale and strategy for voter funded media – download the latest draft “How to Create Public Interest Media in Your Democratic Community” at http://votermedia.org/publications.

I welcome more comments on all this!

Vancouver contest news

I’ve made a short URL for the ballot: http://votermedia.org/van

Welcome a new contestant this week: http://hummingbird604.com

Chris raised some important issues about this contest in his comment on my previous post. Feel free to add your comments. I’ll respond in a future post.

Welcome back Frances Bula

Today I did the weekly tally of votes in the Vancouver Election Blog Contest, and updated the ranking & awards shown on the ballot. I think the new voting system we’ve been using for two weeks now is working pretty well so far. What do you think? See also the tally spreadsheet and cumulative awards.

With this update I’ve added Frances Bula’s new independent blog to the ballot.

First results from absolute dollar voting; new contestant

I just finished tallying the votes from the Vancouver contest’s first week of “absolute dollar” voting, where you type in an award for each contestant. See results on the current ballot, and details of the tallying on this spreadsheet. There were some dramatic moves: Newcomer Vancity Buzz shot up to #1, and Miss 604 jumped from #13 to #3 – congrats to both!

I think it’s too early to draw conclusions on whether absolute dollar voting is a good system. Let’s see how it goes for the next week or two, then discuss.

One issue worth noting is how we should treat blank entries. Many voters fill in positive numbers for one or a few contestants, and leave the others blank. Some voters fill in all blanks with positive numbers or zeroes. A few voters fill in a zero or two, a positive number or two, and leave the rest blank. Overall statistics are 60% blanks, 12% zeroes and 28% positive numbers.

So far I have been ignoring blanks, not counting them at all. One can argue for counting blanks as votes for $0. Or a compromise could be to count a blank as half a vote (or some other fraction) for $0.

Reasons for ignoring blanks:
1. It empowers voters by giving them more options – blank = “don’t know”, $0 = “don’t like”.
2. If blanks are counted as $0, that could make it very hard for neglected competitors to work their way up the rankings.
3. Competitors that move up too high into awards will then appear on the radar of more voters, who will have the opportunity of voting them back down the next week if they want to. One week of “too high” is not a big deal.

BTW we welcome another new contestant this week – “Left eye on Vancouver” – see ballot.

Absolute dollar voting; new contestant

I’ve just completed the weekly vote count and update for the Vancouver Election Blog Contest ballot. Welcome new contestant Vancity Buzz!

In search of the ideal voting system design, we’re trying a new variation of dollar voting. Starting now, you vote by typing in what dollar prize you would like to award each contestant – see ballot, where I’ve given a general description and instructions. After the first week of voting, I’ll post a spreadsheet showing in detail how the tallying works.

One key reason for voting in absolute dollar amounts rather than up/down incremental adjustments is to slow down what I call “vote decay”. Most people don’t vote every week. So we can get a more information-rich consensus by using a vote for more than one week, if it hasn’t been updated by that voter. But if voting is by incremental adjustment and the ranking has changed, then it becomes less clear what last week’s vote means in the context of this week’s new ranking. That’s less of a problem with absolute-dollar voting, so old votes can meaningfully be used for more weeks.

Another nice feature of absolute dollar voting is that I can use the same ballot format for in-the-money contestants as out-of-the-money contestants. Let’s see how it goes…

Cumulative award totals

Ballot with contestant links

Vancouver contest terms and name update

I’ve amended the Vancouver contest terms by adding:

[… we may…:]
(o) change the contest's name;
(p) change the contest's focus from Vancouver to British Columbia and back again.

Reasons:
With the election coming soon, I think it’s better to shorten the name from “Vancouver Voters’ Guide Blogging Contest” to “Vancouver Election Blog Contest” (see ballot).
When the Vancouver election is over, I’d like to morph the contest to focus on BC issues and the election (& referendum) coming up in May 2009. There’s a lot of overlap in coverage of Vancouver and BC anyway.

I welcome your comments!

Why Shift to Dollar Voting?

Starting this Monday July 14 (vive le quatorze!), I plan to implement a new feature in the Vancouver Blogging Contest ballot: “dollar voting”. It will let voters determine not only the ranking of contestants, but also how the $300 weekly award pool gets divided. Until now, we fixed the division into five prizes: $100, $80, $60, $40, $20. From next week, voters will be able to adjust those amounts, but the total will still be $300. They can also increase or decrease the number of prizes.

The ballot format will still be simple – three choices on each contestant (up, same, down). But for those contestants receiving awards, votes will adjust their prizes directly. (Whereas until now, votes adjusted the ranking, which then determined prizes.) The vote tallying method will balance total up and down moves, and round them off in $10 increments.

Why should we try this? To follow the fundamental principle of empowering voters rather than administrators.

We could worry that a surge of voters supporting one blog might give it the whole $300. This would be “a bad thing”; most people agree that voters benefit from media diversity. But if most people agree, then wouldn’t most voters vote to share the funds more widely?

With greater power comes greater responsibility, and I am hoping that voters will rise to the challenge. Let’s imagine the scenario where one blog has substantially more supporters than other blogs. This could be due partly to higher quality, partly to a longer history, partly to promoting the blog, and partly to telling readers about the contest and asking for their vote. Whatever the reasons, suppose voters start awarding one blog more than $200 of the $300 weekly pool. Would that blog continue to tell its readers to vote it even more of the funding?

This is where it gets interesting. That blog would seem to face a conflict of interest. It may seem to be in its interest to keep asking for more. But if that would significantly harm media diversity, then it’s not in the voters’ interest to give them more. So if the blog asks for more, voters may at some point recognize the conflict of interest and start losing confidence and trust in that blog. Short-term greed could harm its reputation and its long-term income. This factor should promote self-restraint, thus mitigating the conflict of interest.

Thus one thing I hope to encourage by dollar voting is discussion of the relative merits of each blog. A more responsible popular blog could start comparing the quality of other blogs, and guiding its readers in voting on them. Popular blog A could recommend that its readers vote for serious insightful blog B, even if those voters don’t actually read blog B. Blog A may be drawing insight from blog B and presenting it in a more accessible way.

We have actually tested another version of dollar voting, at UBC in January 2008, where we called it “Interpolated Consensus”. Voters gave cash awards to nine of the eleven contestants – a reasonably broad distribution.

So let’s take off the training wheels and see how this bike can cruise!