Thursday, August 19, 2010

Lowered maximum vote from 40% to 30%

We've now had many months of testing and feedback on the votermedia.org ballot (e.g. UBC), in particular the menu options for blog funding shares. To increase competition among blogs, we've decided to reduce the maximum share you can vote when there are 5 or more blogs competing, from 40% to 30%.

Before long, we plan to enhance our system so as to allow different communities to use different voting parameters, including this maximum setting. But for now it's "one size fits all" -- same model for every community. However, at least we adapt to the number of blogs competing, with a higher maximum vote share when there are fewer blogs.

We welcome your comments & advice!

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Shorter URLs like votermedia.org/ubc

Today we implemented a system of shorter web addresses for VoterMedia community ballot pages. For example, the page for the University of British Columbia Alma Mater Society is now:
votermedia.org/ubc

instead of votermedia.org/communities/82-ubc-ams. Sweet!

The old longer URLs still work too, but we'll probably phase them out after a while, so please update your links.

Our first video: VoterMedia at UBC

We recently uploaded our first video to Youtube:

Transcript available here. The video is also on our home page at votermedia.org. We're learning as we go along, so please comment, email or phone me with advice on how to improve our AV techniques -- editing, composition etc. More videos in production!