Event 2 is scheduled to open this evening in The Scripting Games - remember, all times on the Scripting Games Web site are GMT. You will need to adjust for your local time zone.
Voting on Event 1 is scheduled to end on May 7th, so you still have 5 days to earn pointlets and leave comments for your colleagues. As of right now, we have over 330 entries, and an astounding 4,900 votes - an average ratio of more than 14 votes per entry. Folks, that’s seven times more than we’ve been able to provide in the past by just having “expert judges” voting.
Those experts are now being put to better use, providing the learning experience we so much want to deliver. They’re posting in their own blogs (list) as well as here on PowerShell.org, and there’s a lot to read. I’m delighted that we’ve been able to provide so much commentary before Event 2 starts, since that’ll doubtlessly help everyone do better.
The average CrowdScore is 2.551 per entry - obviously there’s everything from 1-point entries to 5-point entries. Folks are being pretty critical, and identifying things they don’t like, as well as things they do. With more than 1800 comments (that’s an average of more than 5 per entry), hopefully competitors are starting to get some take-aways from the community as well.
On Mighty Panel of Celebrity Judges will start awarding first, second, and third place in Event 1 very soon, and that process will take a few days. Keep in mind that their decisions are in no way connected to the community-based CrowdScore. Instead, they’re exploring entries on their own, stating with the ones “favorited” by our expert commentary judges.
Also, I’ve heard some concern about people trying to “cheat” the system by simply dropping in random votes in order to rack up pointlets and win prizes. We’re watching for that - we log IP addresses, vote times, and a lot of other data. We’ll be filtering the votes before awarding prizes, so there’s just no value in cheating. You won’t see that filtering - we’re doing it on an offline copy of the data so that there’s no chance of accidentally deleting anything valuable - but you’ll also be happy to know that, right now, there’s very little in the way of anything suspicious, and nothing that’s been confirmed.
I want to re-emphasize that the CrowdScore activity doesn’t become a true learning experience until after the Games are over, which is when we can start mining that data and divining some crowdsourced best practices and patterns - creating our own community sense of “right and wrong” in PowerShell. I also want to point out that, after the Games, we’ll be posting all entries, and their comments, into easier-to-download archives (I know the Web site doesn’t make copy n paste super-easy; that’s largely an artifact of what we need to do to display things properly; we’re not offering downloads at this time mainly to control server load).
Enjoy Event 2!