Talk:2012 calendar

From Geohashing

Three words: Hashscots gone wild. -- [[user:thepiguy]] 21:07, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

The HHHHH disapproves. -- relet 00:06, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

I like the idea of voting each month, but then I wouldn't want to introduce the limitation of a fixed theme, but rather write something like "The photo should have some relation to geohashing in addition to being taken at the geohash, in order to make it an interesting calender. It could contain, for example, a Hashscot, an xkcd marker, a Google Earth Pin, a Stupid Grintm, etc.". I think we should try to fix this and discuss other details quickly, so that all issues are (ideally) resolved until the end of 2010! Some issues I can think of at the moment and my suggestions to them:

  1. Nomination: I would suggest the photos for each month should be nominated by the photographer itself and/or any persons in the picture, to assure that they are okay with it probably being printed in the calender
    • What are the requirements for a photo to be nominated? It should be from an expedition of that month, taken close to the geohash, but reaching the geohash is not required. Older photos could be nominated for either the Cover or December. Any photo needs to be available in high resolution of course...
  2. Voting: I suggest voting during the preceding month (e.g. voting for the January picture from February 1 to February 28) only for November we would need to shorten this period (one week? two weeks? How much time is needed for layout, printing and shipping?). Every registered user can cast one vote (or two? I'm sure I wont also be able to decide ;) ).
  3. Ribbon: We need a cool ribbon of course!
    • I uploaded a picture for the ribbon: Photographer.png please feel free to improve on it!
    • For a name I'm still suggesting Star Photographer Achievement

Um, so much from me for today. --HiroProtagonist 04:29, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


Nominations

+1. I would suggest to allow nominations by other people. I would like to allow the active wiki browsers and photography enthusiasts to propose nominations. The author of the photo must, of course, be informed and support the nomination.
We can prepare the layout in advance, and just add a photo and a good quote for November. Printing and initial delivery takes minimum two weeks, international shipping and redistribution should have an allowance of two weeks as well. That's why I suggested to skip December, and hurry for November. :) -- relet 11:45, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
And what would "hurry for November" mean exactly? According to your calculation we need to allow for four weeks of printing+international distribution, so the November picture would have to be decided already by the end of November?! --HiroProtagonist 15:22, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
How about if we pull the Nov/Dec(Oct?) photos from 2010 to give us time to prepare and print? Jiml 16:33, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
First of all, I think the October picture we can certainly take from October 2011, since voting during November does not conflict with the printing schedule. Taking the Nov/Dec picture from the respective 2010 months is a good possibility I think, but for at least one picture (the cover?) I would love a voting on "best geohashing picture ever" --HiroProtagonist 17:15, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
Perfect! Let's do that! Cover image: Best geohashing photo from May 2008-Oct 2011. Nov and Dec from 2010, all other months from 2011. We need to decide on a voting procedure! -- relet 17:32, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


Voting procedure: I would like to have two features - open voting (since we do not have authenticated user accounts and not discussing strong opinions, we should really just be able to state our votes and sign with our names), and if possible some preference/cumulative voting. Ideally a condorcet variant, but that is difficult to realize in a wiki. Or does anyone know some simple, useful voting portals? If not, we might just allow anyone to give one or more pictures their support and have that add up. -- relet 17:36, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I support open voting, anything else would be to unnecessarily complicated for this. After reading about the Condorcet method on Wikipedia I'm impressed by the idea, but I seems quite complicated to implement. I would suggest either Bucklin voting or Borda count in each case with a limited number of ranks (3? 4?). --HiroProtagonist 19:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
Um, it's like only 5 days till January 1st, so could we maybe decide on a voting procedure now?! =) At the moment, I like Bucklin voting best, but I'm quite willing to be persuaded.
Picture A Picture B Picture C Picture D
named first preference by ... voters 7 5 4 4
named second preference by ... voters 4 7 5 4
named third preference by ... voters 2 9 6 3
To explain the procedure of Bucklin voting: Any voter names his first, second and third favourite picture. Example with 20 voters: In the beginning you only look at the first preference votes. Since no picture has the majority (10 or more) of votes, none wins directly. So we add the second preference votes to the first preference votes. This gives us 11 for A, 12 for B, 9 for C and 8 for D. Now there is a picture (two in fact) with more than 10 votes, so we have a winner, namely picture B.
If after taking into account the second votes, still no picture has a majority, you continue by adding third votes, etc. Instead of 3 ranks, we can also have more (4? 5? as many as pictures?) but you can anyway also only name your first (or first and second, etc.) choice. I would not allow for equal ranking, to make the procedure easier. What do you say? --HiroProtagonist 11:39, 26 December 2010 (EST)


Timing of the voting: I would suggest there is always exactly one month time to vote. For Nov and Dec the pictures (which are from expeditions of Nov or Dec 2010 respectively) should be nominated till the end of Dec 2010 and voting can take place during Jan 2011. For all the other months voting takes place in the subsequent month. Voting on the cover takes place in November, so that all is decided by the end of November. --HiroProtagonist 19:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Let's get this started

Do we have to vote on a voting method? I support Schulze and Bucklin in that order of preference. I also suggest that anyone just adds a line in the form

1 2 3 4 5 -- ~~~~

to the discussion page of the suggestion page for that month. Where 1 2 3 4 5 is the order of preference of the pictures on the month page. The order may not be changed after voting begins (although I wouldn't mind to allow adding pictures if something awesome is found late, and people can be convinced to change their votes.) -- relet 04:03, 5 January 2011 (EST)

No, we don't have to formally vote on voting of course, let's just start doing it. If someone (relet?) is willing to take over the interpretation of the voting data according to the Schulze method, then let's just pick that one! If for some reason a lot of people don't like this system, we can still change the voting method for the other months! --HiroProtagonist 06:50, 5 January 2011 (EST)
support --Crox 11:17, 5 January 2011 (EST)
support --Robyn 20:47, 5 February 2011 (EST) If someone is going to do the work, I trust him to come up with a fair method of selecting photos.

Calendar Dates

I was disappointed to find that Geohashing Day and Mouseover Day were not on the 2010 calendar. Please let the 2012 calendar display them, and other geek holidays. I suggest:

Pi Day - 14 March (3.14)
Star Wars Day - 4 May ("May the forth")
Towel Day/Geek Pride Day - 25 May
International Ice Cream for Breakfast Day - first Saturday in February
Talk Like a Pirate Day - 19 September
Pretend to Be a Time Traveller Day - 8 December

Add anything you like, but I'd avoid anything political, religious, or confined to one area of the world. Let us know if anything above would make you uncomfortable to have it on your calendar. - Robyn

I would love to have all those "geek days" in the calendar! --HiroProtagonist 01:42, 6 February 2011 (EST)

Nomination Requirements

I just found this (I know, it's on the front page). I really like the first two winners, November and December.

The requirements make sense, but they don't seem to have been followed. December is not high resolution (it's 0.5MP, but taken on a 10MP camera, so there's hope) and was taken 2-3 hours from the coordinates (although probably an accurate representation). One of my photos was nominated, it's also low resolution (I can provide uncompressed 12MP), I didn't give prior support (but I am now, it made me very happy in fact), and it doesn't contain any of the suggested subjects.

I left a message on Pi's talk page asking for an original. He didn't explicitly reply with permission, but I'm assuming he saw it and didn't remove it. In this case, I really don't mind about the time from coordinates. Assuming landscapes are ok, my own will work. What I believe is currently January's first place is also low resolution. Permission was obtained from Mtu, but Seamus d similarly did not reply or remove it.

Lastly, is it "in the spirit" of this project to both nominate yourself and vote yourself highest?
--Juventas 22:23, 25 February 2011 (EST)

When I nominated a picture, I always informed the people that are in it. I guess in case they didn't reply giving explicit permission, it makes sense to ask again once they have actually won. Concerning the resolution issue, I think it's enough to ask for a high resolution version when the picture has won. If no high resolution should be available, we could go for the second choice instead, I guess - but let's hope there always is a high res available ;) I would not nominate a picture taken for example by a mobile in the first place... I added a "checklist" so that we can keep an overview of high resolution and obtained permissions! Concerning the other requirements, I would say they are more a sort of guidelines ;) If there's a good (geohashing-)story to it, then it's okay with me :) --HiroProtagonist 16:37, 27 February 2011 (EST)
It didn't occur to me that the voting system works well if we have to go with the next choice. So yes, it works to overlook the requirements for the nominations, but then check for the winner. Thanks for starting this project. --Juventas 23:17, 27 February 2011 (EST)
Oh, and I would say that you can definitely nominate yourself. Also, voting yourself highest would be perfectly okay with me, this is a form of a preference voting, so it's not quite that important which is the highest ranked... If you only vote for yourself (and everything else equally low) that would seem "against the spirit" to me, but in the end everybody has to decide that on their own...--HiroProtagonist 17:26, 27 February 2011 (EST)

Aspect Ratio

What aspect ration should be required of the submitted photographs? I'd like to nominate Elbie's panoramic photo of the approach to the Geohashing Day spot in the Pitt River, but it wouldn't fill a calendar page, and would lose impact and resolution in cropping.

2011-05-21 49 -122.panorama.jpg

Beating a Dead Horse

I couldn't help but notice that it doesn't appear a calendar was created for 2012. I have a theory that very few people actually use paper calendars anymore except to sell insurance real estate (or is this a US only thing?) I have a theory that this is because people with iPhones can't figure out how to sync their phone with a paper calendar, but I have an Android phone so I can't test out this theory.

While it would be a significantly more expensive purchase, I would like to float the idea that the calendar be turned into a useful item, like a digitally printed golf geohashing towel.

Pro Con
Unconstrained production date Increased cost of final product
Compressed voting time ->
  more project buzz
Incur jealous wrath of non-towel wielding geohashers
Actually useful (in case of raptor attack)
Less likely to be damaged while underwater

Implementation of an alternative production would preserve the Star Photographer achievement, additionally the item could be overpriced enough to allow some small donation in the group's name to a charity or to seed a foundation to offset medical expenses resulting from any future hashtastrophes. Obviously a new achievement would need to be created for photographing your towel at a hashpoint on May 25th or the following Saturday except in cases where the prior Saturday fell on May 21st.

I would want a geohashing towel! I would just love to see something more interesting than just the geohashing logo on the towel. -- relet 11:09, 8 February 2012 (EST)