I’m posting my blow-by-blow experiences as someone who is entering this competition (as is my wife). Wish me luck (I think her idea’s more solid, but I’m not saying that out loud.)

23 April:

Only a few foolhardy individuals have uploaded entries. They’re brave. By being first, any ratings cast for them are done so without context. With hindsight, will their vote seem fair, underwhelming, or meanspirited? From crushing to triumphant, you can cast one of “poor”, “okay”, “good”, “great”, “awesome”, earning you from one to five stars. “Poor” seems to be the analogue of a GCSE ‘U (unclassified)’ rating: acknowledgement of entry, but deep down an unspoken ‘fail’.

24 April:

The deadline seems to have been extended. Just-B acknowledging that creatives tend to do their homework on Sunday nights? It’s been pushed back to the  Monday after the original Friday deadline, so hopefully there will be a few more brave souls putting down their Photoshop pencils and submitting their entries.

Mercifully, the page sorts on newness, by default. That means early entrants are less visible over time as they are pushed to later pages. There’s no visibility penalty for entering late.

24 April (update):

Uploading my proposal… oh my god! At 176 words, computer says no. So I strip it back, pull a paragraph here, a pronoun there. 148 words – I could even add in ‘treasure hunt’ with that much latitude! But Word and the BTWEEN site are not in agreement as to what constitutes 150 words. You’d think Word would have the upper hand, being named after words, but unless you know where the datacentre is, you just can’t argue with a Drupal installation.

… So it seems there’s a condition I missed earlier. A 500 character limit. Feverishly, I remove semantic line breaks, unifying formerly separate paragraphs, trimming punctuation, excess words, redundancy, pitch poetry. Eliminating phrases duplicated to emphasise core aspects of the project. Redundant phrases. Pace. Pace and redundant phrases. I am forced to acknowledge that brevity of pitch, compression of expression, is one of the core aspects of this project, not obvious from the outset.

24 April (redux):

500 characters / 150 words = 3.3 characters per word. Assuming every word will be followed by either a space or punctuation plus a space, this means (optimally) 150 two-letter words for your pitch. How you can squeeze any of ‘psychogeographic’, ‘locative’, ‘community’ or ‘folksonomic’ in and still hope to benefit from your full 150 word allocation? This reminds me of those “5000 hours free” adverts AOL used to run. 5000 free hours in your first month would require you to be online for 150 hours a day.

25 April:

It’s starting to fill up now. Votes are coming thick and fast. Strangely, the only people voting seem to be other entrants. At least one entrant seems to be on the committee who ultimately decides the winner. There’s a mystery user who seems to be voting multiple times on the same entries. Can’t they make their minds up? Or perhaps it’s a more honest angle, that your own judgement and the criteria you apply change as you see more entries. What you thought was great on the first day may not seem so clever by the last. And those multiple votes are a reflection of that.

A few people have voted on their own projects. For shame. Is it somehow good form, or even acceptable, when it’s only a website button? I hope they realise it’s not anonymous. We know who you are.

25 April (later): Even more entries! Still, no-one’s really commenting. And on reflection, who are the commenters? An interesting thing is happening as a result of the complete coincidence of the set of people entering, and the set of people voting. You have to register on the BTWEEN site to cast a vote or comment, but filling a registration form is so much electronic hard work, you’d only do it if there’s a pay-off. And the only payoff is being able to enter. Another thing to take into account is the prominence of the entry listing page itself; it’s tucked away in the BTWEEN site, in the middle of a block in the middle of the left-hand side of the page. It’s practically invisible, being a double middle. Why would a random stranger spend a few minutes of their Internet slacking time perform a surf-by voting? Partly, you don’t want them to, for one – the public is renowned for their terrible judgement and appalling taste. But getting a few people from other parts of the creative and media continuum may add some new perspectives.

Putting these things together, a few things emerge:

1. It’s only natural that the only people voting are the same ones who are entering.
2. As it’s other competitors, and a small pool, no-one wants to say things that may be interpreted as critical.
3. You can see who’s left comments and ratings (even if the score is hidden), which leaves you wide open for retaliation (which so far doesn’t seem to be happening).

Is it better to have a score of 0, which means no-one has passed judgement, or to have a score of 3, which means you originally voted yourself a five, then someone later rated you a one? Scores, ratings – always fraught with indecision, danger, commas.

As a side note, did anyone test the site on IE, which accounts for 85% of the browser market, or just the niche browsers (Safari and Mozilla seem happy with it). Ignoring the communist browsers is now unacceptable behaviour; is it better to adhere to pure standards, the letter of the law, at the expense of the majority? It seems we are trading one oppressor for another.

If someone would just cast a vote, I’d shut up and move on. Vote, people! Register first, people!

26 April:

Family visit so no check-in till 6pm. Oh wow, Ben Dalton has been dropping comments in, and he has some interesting things to say. But what’s this, he has no entries of his own? He votes anyway, nothing gained but something ventured. Props to you, Ben!

27 April:

It’s a Sunday. There’s not much activity on the site – people are clearly out at church, Tesco, Tesco, or Tesco. But what’s this…? Seems Ben has taken the opportunity, with his enemies at rest, to post a stack of entries. It’ s not quite the last minute (4:59pm on Monday being the last minute) but projects uploaded today aren’t going to get a massive amount of eyeball exposure. What kind of strategy is this? If there are no more entries, Ben’s projects remain (by default) on the front page, and get the most recent mindshare. Can he turn this mindshare into top ratings?

I’m wondering if it’s worth putting in more proposals. There’s a notion in my mind that uploading more implies a few things:

• You are diluting your projects; multiple entries suggest you don’t know which is your strongest, and you lack judgement
• Voting apathy will count against you; if people only vote for a few projects, they’re less likely to give votes to the same people repeatedly

But it also implies a few positive things

• You have a stack of relevant ideas to the medium
• If you throw enough adhesive material at the wall, some will stick

But ultimately, good ideas don’t just materialise instantly. If it has any merits, it usually has been chewed over, thought through, and refined; 99% perspiration and 1% typing and uploading.

27 April:

Arrival of the wildcards!

There’s new blood in ExplodingNarrative! A new entrant has appeared. Are these johnny-come-latelies going to benefit from having a wealth of prior work to look into, informing their own proposals and providing concrete examples to reflect on? Or does this very practice dilute an otherwise pure idea, watering down the core aims of a project with smatterings of ideas from others in ways that ma not sit together so well?

27 April (midnight):

Interesting. A few entries are still dropping in.There’s a number of projects there which – well, let’s say, they’re over-rated. A few have had one rating, given by the person who submitted the project in the first place, and they’ve clearly decided their own offspring is a full-marks, awesome-grade five out of five. There’s one side of me that feels sorry for these people; that there’s a certain decency they’re lacking. There’s something almost sad about having one top-grade rating, given by yourself; and that no-one else joins in with this process. No-one has reinforced their opinion. They’re out on a limb, no-one wanting to pop their bubble. So there’s a stack of projects that, out of a combination of authorial bombast and voter politeness, will always retain a full score, despite no-one much commenting, or viewing, or engaging with the projects otherwise.

28 April (just):

Because the just-b site software lists who has voted on each project page, I feel I can’t vote down some of the projects with single five-star ratings from their authors. It would be obvious who popped their bubbles, and with egos like that behind them, would fear retaliatory negative voting. We need more people not submitting entries to join in the voting process.

28 April:

There’s more people uploading entries. One guy has just splurged 5 at once. I think he may be leading a class, as another stack have also just been uploading… every time I refresh, there’s more there. I think they’re all students; suspicions are

• Uploading projects in the last 5 minutes possible
• Slack organisation; some are skipping the 500 character limit, stopping their posts mid word then finishing them off in the comments. Bad uploader! You get 500 characters and 150 words like everyone else.
• Lack of awareness of mscape and what it can do
• Confusion over technical terms and flawed application of technology

Also, they’re all voting for themselves and each other.

What is it with this self-voting plague? It’s all documented on the site, for all to see. Do they really think their just-submitted project magically warrants a 100% rating without anyone thinking it’s rather suspicious?

I’ve noticed this in the other public-vote sections of the b.Tween site. Projects with one rating, 5/5 – you can smell a mile off that the uploader gave themselves that vote, shamelessly and rather tragically.

Either b.Tween are engaged in an interesting honesty and public review experiment, or a simple check in the site software to prevent people from voting for their own projects would have changed the whole feeling of the tendering process.

So the deadline has passed, and it’s presumably a public, then internal, voting process at b.Tween to determine the five projects gaining the seed money to develop their presentation before the final pitches for the final award. I’ll keep posting as news happens.