I thought it would be fun to try something that has been done here in the past, but do it in a way that causes a little less controversy.
The goal is to rank the “Top 25” FRC teams for the 2011 Season much like college sports. Some of the issues mentioned about the last time this was done have been addressed.
There are some rules that need to be followed to try and keep “popularity” out of it as much as possible.
You cannot cast a vote for any team you are involved with.
You cannot cast a vote for a team that has not played a match.(IE if your team doesn’t play until week 6, it will not be eligible until then)
All voting must be done through the frctop25.com submission page Anyone involved in FRC can vote regardless of years involved
There are 2 separate polls, a mentors poll, and a student poll. Please indicate on the submission form which category applies to you.
Votes for Week 1 must be in by Tuesday, March 8th. The new poll will come out every Wednesday evening before that weeks events. (The Week 1 Poll Will come out Wednesday the 9th)
I will be checking each voter to ensure they meet the above criteria. Mike Starke (Mike Starke on CD) and myself will be the only ones to see the actual voters and their respective votes. We will leave it up to the voters themselves if they chose to reveal their lists. No “anonymous” votes will be accepted.
Votes will be tallied by assigning 25 points to your #1 Selection, 24 points for #2 and so on. With the #1 ranking going to the team that receives the most points. #2 the second most and so on.
Votes for week 1 can be sent in Saturday at 9PM up until the deadline. If you fail to comply with the above conditions your list will be void for that week. Please do as much as you can to watch that weeks events, don’t just go by the winners, try to do some research.
Check out the site at FRCTop25.com
(Note the teams listed are for testing purposes only!)
If you have any ideas to amend the voting process or improve the website please post. And again, have fun with this, don’t take any of it personally and have a great 2011 season!
There could be a different way of going about this, you know how the FIRST Competition is about ‘coopertition’ and gracious professionalism?
There should a Top 25 for that, instead of pure performance, because there are plenty of rookie teams and ‘young’ teams that want recognition, but if their robot underperforms, then they don’t get recognition.
I think it would be nice to recognize the less funded/smaller teams by making a Top 25 Graciously Professional teams, or something similar.
Do you plan on supporting an API or an iframe. This is the sort of thing I would like to embed within the scouting pit.
Also after having the social network on loop, I had an idea that may be more appropriate for you to implement than me. Do a facemash sort of thing but for the robots. my thought was to edit team numbers from photos and to put two robots up against each other.
This would help to eliminate preconceptions and natural biases people have to power teams from past years.
Then again you use the college sports example, which actually encourages these biases.
A similar thing could be done with match videos, where you have to select one team from the 6.
One thing I have noticed flipping through the photos that many young teams have very well designed robots this year. There is no reason they shouldn’t be able to rise to the top 25 simply because they don’t have “FIRST fame”
Also, I believe the 3rd year rule may increase the likelihood of +3 year teams being voted for.
The nature of that type of action makes it poorly suited to this type of thing. The reason this “works” is that through webcasts, a single individual can view many different robots from across the country. Acts of Coopertition or GP typically affect an individual, single team, or single event.
It is absolutely a great idea to recognize teams that display great Coopertition and Gracious Professionalism, but that recognition is probably more appropriate in person at the event or in a thread in the Thanks ans/or Congrats section after the event. Ranking teams based on their GP just doesn’t seem like that great an idea to me. I don’t see how you can say that the 148 is any more or less GP than 234 or 365 or 93 or anyone else for that matter.
All teams currently listed on the website were merely put in place to test the overall layout of the site. Submissions that were sent in were just testing that aspect of the website.
Votes will not be tallied unless they are submitted during the valid voting times for that week which are from the Saturday that ends the week through the following Tuesday. For example, The week 1 Voting times are from Saturday, March 5th through Tuesday, March 8th.
What’s stopping people from voting multiple times, as members of multiple teams, or as both a student and a mentor? You should think of a way to have a login to minimize this. Also, you may want to consider allowing a team to have only one login. The weighting on the votes will be fairer then.
They aren’t allowing anonymous voting. Voters are also not allowed to vote for any team they’re involved with.
Regarding the “GP” aspect: This is a “Top 25” poll. I don’t see anybody saying any definitions of “Top”. In other words, if that’s how you wanted to fill out and submit a list, that’s how you fill out and submit a list.
what if you had a “top 25” for each regional competition. So people fill out who they thought was “top 25” in each regional. And based on that information, the “overall top 25” was calculated based on answers from each regional?
I don’t know what kind of DB you are using, but I would recommend storing the timestamp of each vote. I like the up and down sections, and this would allow you to eventually provide stock graphs for the teams.
Also the titles of the charts are a little confusing, actually more so if you just didn’t include it.
If I was in control of this, I would just remove them. For me the the table is naturally intuitive. Also note that the arrows are offset from the actual row, potentially you could use a smaller arrow [the same size as your font] and it would have the same effect. (make the arrows the same size)
again these are small things, but they look good.
regarding minibots, personally I don’t think voting is the best way to rank minibots. The twitter feed contains match bonuses and I plan on using a team’s estimated bonus contribution to figure out who the best minibots actually are.
Do you plan to weight some user’s contributions more than others? I don’t see how one person could possibly rank all of the the team without basically guessing.
I would prefer rather than a “student / mentor” poll there be a “public” and “private” poll - “private” being random qualified individuals added to the polls.
Yea, if you were going to have maybe 15 or so people for a “professional” or “more realistic” poll, that would be good. Maybe contact some CD users via pm, have them sign in, vote and even keep who they are secret. Sorta Looking Forward.
While I don’t want to assert that my opinion means anything more than jack squat, I was thinking of making blog posts on my personal bog every week or so with a top 10 / 25 list along these lines
We should have a public poll posted and then do a FIRSTcast of these 15 or so “experts” counting down from 25-1 and them giving reasons why the teams are where they are.
Yeah, I think I’d be more interested in hearing people who definitely know what they’re talking about express their opinions—rather than be drowned out by the votes of a lot of people who may not have any particular credibility to make these assessments.
