We asked for your harshest critiques of our voting process, and you gave it. Here is what we learned from our community following our first open call for project proposals and voting. While we know we can't please everyone, we want you to know that we take thoughtful critiques and suggestions seriously, and will refer to this page when we plan next year's vote. Thanks!

Popularity Contest

To be truly effective (i.e. not just a popularity contest), the process would need to attract people who have no allegiance to the projects at hand. This would encourage voters to choose projects based on the guidelines instead of peer pressure.

My hunch is that at least 90% of potential voters were brought into the process because a contestant asked them to participate. As a result, their primary allegiance was to one project. But each potential voter had to register for an account and also pick at least four other projects. Many people left without even registering. (David James, NetSquared Results & Commentary, April 22, 2007)

7 selected projects are in the first 16 places in the voting list.???
In the ballot, the projects have been displayed in alphabetic order and in the results 1/3 of the selected projects are in the first places in the voting list.
Very strange? right? (lglira, Results vs. Order, April 18, 2007)

mmm very strange, five projects start with "A", and they have been in first places in the voting list? and the project "100 innovators" has been the first project in the voting list?.
Is this the strange hand of stats? or the people just chose the first projects in the voting list.

Please publish the list of projects with the number of votes, in the same order as the voting list (alphabetic order). (lglira, Mmmm, Very Strange, April 18, 2007)

I also suggested having 2 rounds of voting - the first can be a popularity contest, so long as it cuts the list down to the point where people can reasonably look at all the proposals. This would have made at least step 2 meritocratic, while getting rid of non-serious projects in step 1. I was ignored. (Holden, What is the Goal of NetSquared?, April 14, 2007)

Too Many Proposals & The Ballot

I am sure (especially after the voting fiasco(s) that my friends and family all 25 or so of them did not read 5 proposals let alone the 25 or 30 they might need to make an informed decision -- I am sure they all voted for me and four others -- so what. Most had no clue what a NetSquared was!(Michael Gibbon, Key to Informed Voting? An Informed Electorate - No Really It Is, April 16, 2007)

The ballot has no context on it; you have to click links/download PDFs to get any details on the projects at all...Far from encouraging people to read through all the proposals, Net2 has discouraged it, encouraging people to search by category. (Holden, What is th Goal of NetSquared?, April 14, 2007)

To select 5 proposals out of a field of 150 is a task that many people, even friends and believers, find daunting, and unfortunately, won’t get done.The re-design implications point toward a less-time consuming voting regimen.That’s regrettable because so much hard work went into the fairness issue, which I whole-heartedly applaud.It is indeed the microcosm of the general spectrum of challenge that we all face: to be heard, considered, engaged, and to convert our audience to a desired action. (Rich Reader, Usability Design, UI, Performance & Unit Test, April 13, 2007)

Transparency & Voting

Last time I checked, TechSoup does not plan on releasing the voting results. The results should be released (anonymously if necessary); not doing so undermines transparency.
Unless the NetSquared voting statistics are released (and they should!), I can only speculate. The NetSquared process selected popular projects with many friends, not necessarily projects that aligned with their guidelines.My hunch is that at least 90% of potential voters were brought into the process because a contestant asked them to participate. My hunch is that at least 90% of potential voters were brought into the process because a contestant asked them to participate. As a result, their primary allegiance was to one project. (David James, NetSquared Reslts & Commentary, April 22, 2007)

Please share the data. It should be possible to do this. I see that my ballot is tied to my membership on the net2 site so you seem to know everybody *I* voted for. Personally I'd like to see a completely open ballot and would not be averse at all to just opening it up so everyone knows who everyone voted for. You never indicated that it was a hidden ballot anyway so go ahead and open it up. ;-) Now *that* would be web 2.0 hype enabled. (Tobias Eigen, As One of the Homecoming Queens, April 18, 2007)

I am wondering when and where the number of votes per project will be posted. Usually in a voting scenario full disclosure helps the project members to know where they stand respective to others, but primarily proves, at least in part, that the 'vote' isn't fixed. Upholding standards of transparency and fairness it would make sense to get that info up as soon as possible.
Thanks! i look forward to seeing those numbers. :-) (Jay Baydala, Please Post Number of Votes Per Project, April 18, 2008)

Re-Vote

We know a lot more about the pitfalls of the past approach. Let's implement our collective intelligence and vote again. There's no shame in not foreseeing the consequences unless you're George Bush. The beauty of the web is that all this can easily be redesigned. (P Nichols, Nothing But Time Would Be Lost in a Do Over, April 17, 2007)

Member Directory

When I go to http://www.netsquared.org/members I expect to see a member directory - but there is none there. It seems that member profile pages only appear via blogs or keyword searches - this is weird. Please open this up too so that we can see a directory of all members, whether they have posted or not. I want to know who's in this great community and connect up with those that share my interests.(Tobias Eigen, As One of the Homecoming Queens, April 18, 2007)

Buzz for Net2

There is no question that this "flood the vote" attitude has generated way more publicity for NetSquared than trying to focus on project quality would have. And maybe that was the goal all along. So here's my question: were you trying to find the 20 best projects, or trying to generate as much "buzz" as possible around 20 essentially random (or already popular) projects? (Holden, What is the Goal of NetSquared?, April 14, 2007)

Why shouldn't we believe that the sole purpose of this contest was primarily done to generate "buzz" for Netsquared? How could Netsquared ever think that soliciting our own votes was the best way to choose one proposal over another? Also, why would Netsquared be so willing to fork out financial assistance to any organization lacking a clear mission/financial plan, all because it had a vote majority? (Judie, Buzz, April 16, 2007)

Language Barriers & Translation

I would had translated the Netsquared voting pages to other languages. According to Internet World Stats, english speakers represent 29.5% of all Internet users. If this was going to be a worldwide initiative, it would had been important to consider at least the top 5 online spoken languages and translate the voting pages (and the registration e-mail) to Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and German. (Eduardo Bejar, Re: Give It To Us Straight, April 13, 2007)

Moving Forward

Here is what i would do in 2008 -- it's not as complicated as it sounds. Set up three voting blocks:
1)public family, friends and colleagues -- they vote for one project
2)each project submitter(organization) gets two votes -- they each vote for 10 projects
3)the N2 staff, board, gurus whatever -- each vote for 10 projects
This way you keep the popularity contest part(buzz) intact -- hey it's America right! Weight the three voting blocks if you like -- but this way you will be assured to have two blocks, a majority of well informed voters -- who understand what this is all about! (Michael Gibbons, Key to Informed Voting? An Informed Electorate - No Really It Is, April 16, 2007)

I personally found several issues from the content creator’s perspective. Knowing that the presentation has to be high quality, it would be desirable to have a more fully-featured rich-text editor that:
1)Sets font types, colors, and point sizes
2)Creates and manages tables
3)Posts video blogs from YouTube. Readiness to do so would require NetSquared to register its’ blogging system with YouTube.
4)Knows how to cleanly paste text from word processing programs
(Rich Reader, Usability Design, UI, Performance & Unit Test, April 13, 2007)