If this is related somehow (directly or indirectly to this submission), I don’t know. It could just as easily have been some troll that selected one entry and decided to annoy people using it, but look around at the social networks. No-one is really talking about mashupaustralia. Well, no-one except the people submitting the work (and begging for votes). It just doesn’t seem all that likely that it’s co-incidence, but it’s always possible that is it.

It was supposed to be fun. There should have been a community spirit behind it. Instead it’s turned into people patting themselves on the back, and holding the ball too tight, and that’s not dignified behaviour.

on the criticisms that seems to be the downside of openness and democracy but I’m astounded at the lack of netiquette – you’ve got to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and how they will feel when they read your posting, maybe after a long hard day – very different to a face to face when you can respond immediately, read body language etc.

People are coming at this competition from two sides – the web developers who produce really slick sites that deliver a simple point type solution – and the data/gis people like Lisa who really delve into the data side but their interfaces aren’t that slick. Both are really important and I hope the comp will be just the start in bringing them together not building more barriers!

Anyway, the point I wanted to make was it’s easy to tell people to go and comment on other entries, but noone looks past the top 10. People are missing out because they’re just not visible (myself includes obviously). The best solution I think is to remove all 1 and 5 votes. Only friends will ever vote 5, and noone in their right mind will vote something ‘1′ unless they have vested interests.

I do like the suggestion that I am capable of writing a program to cheat! Thanks Igor! Sorry, I’m not. And my cruddy dial-up access would make it useless anyway.

After the time and effort I have spent getting the data and website ready, I have more important things to do than invest in cheating…like sleeping!

As per the feedback from the organisers, your comments are the important thing in the public vote. So visit sites, look at what they are trying to achieve, and provide comments on them. Just remember that all sites are providing ideas for what could be done if data becomes more freely available from Government Departments. I personally think Victoria: Fire Ready is an excellent example of potential capability and hope that will encourage greater data availablity.

If anyone does have relevant feedback, please post it. I would like feedback and suggestions for further development or to just discuss data provided as part of the competition.

I have no evidence that it is anyone on the iNation team specifically doing this. It could be well meaning others, or just someone playing silly games with the voting system for fun.

I’m sure if Stephen Colbert had an entry, or Moot from 4chan, they would have a million votes by now.

I assign no fault to the iNation team, I just think it’s sad they’ve been caught up in the whole issue.

As a test, tonight I rigged up a simple bot to throw about 50-100 1-star votes and drop it down to 6th or 7th (dropping it from 3.7 to 3.3). My hypothesis was that they would respond and down-vote the rest.

As luck would have it, about an hour ago a big flood of votes landed, 50 on the war memorial one and several hundred on the firelocator site.

Everyone other than iNation has now been dropped to a quite uniform 3.1.

The voting system is clearly a farce at this point, the only thing remaining is to basically flood the entire thing so badly that it become an inescapable conclusion the voting has been exploited and the results thrown away.

Also way to ruin the whole point of this competition. Other developers were probably interested in receiving honest feedback and a score representative of how much time and effort they put into making a useful and appealing mashup.

Hope the judges will disregard rating as it is useless.

Lisa are you actually going to respond or just keep clearing those cookies?