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ALRIGHT! So after nearly a year or so after I first announced my intent to do this, here we go. The Programmeringstävling, a programming competition held for anyone in Wintreath.

Things will essentially be how they were in the original design, but due to the timing this will go on for one week, 168 hours, for your submission. After that time submissions will close and voting will begin. I also decided to relax a few rules, so they aren't as strict.

So this Competition's Theme shall be: Unity

Sadly at this time we have no prizes. However if anyone wishes to offer a prize, please post a statement saying that much, or inform the Council.

SO LET THE GAMES BEGIN AND MAY THE VOTING BE EVER IN YOUR FAVOR!

COUNCIL

• @Wintermoot
  
• @Emoticonius
  
• @Gabriel (Pengu)
  

RULES

• You must make the program by yourself during the time limit (one week)
• No one on the Council may be a participant in the event
• Mods for games are acceptable, but you must be able to distribute the game, or a link to the game, provide installation instructions, and the game must be free.
• Submissions must occur prior to, or at, 12:00 (00:00) Midnight EST of the end of the time-limit (one week) or else they will not be valid.
• Teams are not allowed.
• Usage of Libraries and APIs are allowed, but it must be cleared by a Council Member before using. This does not count for the Standard Libraries of any Languages
• Editing your program after the time limit (one week) is up is forbidden until the event has ended. *
• The Program may be written in any programming language, but you are responsible for distributing the program and helping install it.
• The Program can be only tangentially related to the theme. Much like the Ludum Dare.
• Any text displayed by the program, must be in English by default. You can include translations to other languages if you wish.
• Source must be released upon the request of a council member. It is suggested that you make the Source Available ahead of time.
• The program may be as simple or as complex as you wish
• Should there be a prize the Winner of the prize has 96 Hours to claim it, should they fail to do so, the prize shall go to the next in line for the same amount of time.(Note: it should go from 1st place to 2nd place to 3rd place.) Should none of the places claim the prize the prize is unclaimed and it is up to the Council to decide what to do.
• If there are any Prizes the Council shall be in charge of distributing it.
• The Council may issue rulings on these rules during the competition over matters of interpretation, these rulings shall be considered binding and all programs must follow them. Rulings may not be issued more than twelve (12) hours before the end of the competition though.

* - The only exception is for minor changes, in this case the Council must clear your changes before making them


(Note that now the competition has started, I can not actually do anything with the rules, only the Council can. So if you have any requests or questions ask one of the Council Members.)

Count me in.

I will be competing in this! Not spoiling my idea though

It should be noted I am not on the Council because I want to participate.

I've been pointed this way a few times, but I'm not going to participate this time as I won't have time to do my best if I do. I will watch with interest though, and good luck to all the participants

I have put together a bunch of suggestions/thoughts to hopefully improve the next round.

1. Times and dates have to be clearly stated. Rules list the criteria but in addition to this, the relevant dates have to be unmistakably clearly posted.

Why this failed? It was said that the event runs for exactly 168 hours, which however is in conflict with the rule saying midnight is the deadline.

2. Judging criteria have to be clearly stated. We need to know what factors the council takes into consideration while assessing the entries.

Why this failed? Programming is more than just producing a product that seems to be working, or at least it can be. We should know in advance if producing good code is worth anything, or if it just comes down to which entry executes the best idea. Other possible factors are ease of use (installation, interface) and design aesthetics.

3. Sign-up time. Do we or do we not allow people to join at any point? If the timeframe is tightened later on the road, should a separate sign-up period be used to give contestants time to prepare or are we focusing in speed coding?

4. Council and voting. The problem with council is that it limits the contestants when there are few enough to begin with. Depending on the judging criteria we should look into alternative methods of voting:
- alternating council,
- whole community votes or
- contestants themselves vote in a point based system where voting your own entry is forbidden, and voting every other entry is mandatory.

5. Subforum structure. We have the area, let's use it! Separating rules, council matters, sign-ups and submissions into own topics could make it easier to follow what's happening and what's new.

6. Person in charge. When everything goes sideways, one single person has to be able to take the responsibility and act. Having a council that takes a month to make a decision doesn't work here. We need better and more comprehensive initial planning and faster action during rounds. One way of achieving this could be assigning clearly described responsibilities to individual council members.

7. How rules are presented. While there may not be that many rules, grouping them by subject would improve the usability. Having to read a long list from start to bottom each time you need one tiny bit of information is not efficient.

8. Rules we don't need. These provide obvious information we don't need.

• The program may be as simple or as complex as you wish
• If there are any Prizes the Council shall be in charge of distributing it.
• You can include translations to other languages if you wish.

9. What qualifies our judges to judge us?

On the council, they were SUPPOSED to be active however thimgs happened to prevent some of the members from being active after the start. I also made sure the council was either non-programmers or were not wanting to participate. l

The extra rules are merely to clarify or open existing rules.

The judging criteria was supposed to be selected by the council as well, in addition to a voting system as sometimes we may not need a complex voting system if there is two entries.

At this time it is up to @Wintermoot to do the voting since @Emoticonius seems to be busy and @Gabriel (Pengu) seems to be doing relatively nothing or at least takes a bit to get back to you (or is busy with life)

I do not feel like the issues I brought up got addressed... but if nothing else, I want to stress that in my opinion we should know a lot more of the competition before it starts. Imagine if in a cooking show your task would be to make a salad and you then proceed to create a fantastic salad with 50 ingredients, only to hear afterwards that in judges' opinion the fever ingredients the better salad. Or maybe they wanted it to be red only.

It would also be helpful from our point of view to hear in advance how you have intended things to go, "council was supposed to do this and that" still counts as bad organization, especially when it comes to core details of the competition.

When the event ends and how the entries are judged are things that have to be decided before the event starts. Basic stuff like this can't be made up during such a short period.

With a sign-up period before the actual event we would have time to openly search for the judges, inform anyone who might be interested, ask questions and clarifications and just in general allow everyone to plan ahead to fit the event in their schedules.

This was fun nonetheless.

I wanted the council to decide because I was dire tly organizing the event and if I decided anything else I would have ended up biasing it against myself.

I didn't want to lead/organize it, which is why I left it up to the council. Further the council should have the voting be up to the citizens, as that has always been the intention, as per Ludum Dare.

Things could have gone smoother, yes, however the council members knew about one to two weeks or so in advanced who they would be. I told them what their responsibilities would be and they all agreed to the position. I probably could have done better in some aspects, however I am not the only one at fault here either. The lack of willing to act and perfotm their duties as council members is ultimately upon them. I understand real life has gotten in the way (at least for Chocobo and to an extent for Wintermoot, I don't know about Pengu).

In fairness, the role of the Council has been somewhat murky as time has went on.

When I was originally contacted about being on the Council a few weeks back, I was told that its purpose was to interpret the rules in the event there was a question or disagreement. Judging was to be done by Citizens, which gave me the impression that the Council had no role in that area besides being Citizens that could vote. Then the day after the contest started, I was told that we needed to get together and determine judgement criteria, which gave me the impression that we were going to be judging, the same impression that you apparently had, tatte.

Obviously, since the other members haven't been around, that hasn't happened, and I only learned from Chanku's post in this topic earlier today that I had the authority to make judgements on my own. Apparently we're also back to Citizen voting, so I'm at a loss as to the point of the Council determining judging criteria.

I had mentioned that the council had the authority to: "act as judges on the rules of the council, alter the rules when fit, and a few other things." (Or something similar to this). However the original intent is for the council to run the competition, which can be seen in the original thread. The role of the council has always been the same.

However the citizens voting is not a requirement, as the voting was not specified in the rules. As such it would be up to the council, and since the other members are absent, it would follow (and be somewhat obvious for a time-sensitive thing like this) that a council member can act solely unless other members are active. The rules of the council are up to internal debate, which is why I suggested you meet with the other members and create procedure for the Council.

@Wintermoot because of the fact that none of the other members are around, and because I will assume you decided to not meet with the members of the council to decide procedure, ultimately you can run the council yourself. Unless you did setup an internal procedure then that takes precedence. However my statements are merely opinion on what should be done, not on what will be done, as I gave up my position to do so prior.

Your OP states that the Council may issue rulings on the interpretation of rules up to 12 hours before the end of the contest, declare a prize for the contest, approve requests to use libraries, and request that participants release their source code. It doesn't say anything about the Council determining any judgement criteria or having any authority outside of interpreting the rules you posted.

Given the extensive list of rules, it's not unreasonable to believe that any further role for the Council beyond mere interpretation would have been specified there and thus the Council was not authorized to add new rules and decisions. Nowhere does it say the Council can determine the method of judgement, for example. Also given that it's not listed in your extensive rules, I'm not sure how it's "somewhat obvious" that one member can make decisions on their own under any circumstances.

However, you are the organizer of the event, and as you've made your intentions clear I will look into beginning a vote when I get home from work tonight. It's not really a big deal, I just don't like being thrown under a bus like when you imply my "lack of willing to act and perfotm their duties as council members". Regardless of the other members' inactivity, we volunteered to take this role in your event for you, and it's up to you to communicate with us exactly what you expect us to do or what aspects you want us to decide for ourselves. With all due respect, that wasn't very clear until this exchange of posts.

If I had forgotten to mention it to you, my bad as I had thought I had made that clear. Either that or I expected you to know what the council would do, as I had thought (and expected you) to have understood (and read/reread) the original topic that this was brought up, as it is the 'source' for the competition.

The member statement was obvious, not through my rules but on HOW the council would work, especially in the absence of any procedure adopted by the council. However for other things that I thought were ridiculously obvious that I didn't say (because some of the listed things are less obvious and I wanted to make sure they were explicitly allowed)

It is true that I've been busy this last week. I've had very urgent RL matters to take care of. I should be more active now though since things are taken care of.

On the subject at hand, I too was told the same thing as Moot was. And being a non-programmer (the reason I was chosen) I don't think I am capable of deciding the rules since I know literally nothing about programming. Based on what I was told when asked to be on the council, I was under the assumption that the rules were already decided and that my role would be little more than what I was told.