The Next Web Awards live
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Today, the voting round for The Next Web Awards is live. We worked hard to get everything in place.
About two weeks ago Arjen and I had a discussion about elections and how people are stimulated to vote. The conclusion was (at least here in the Netherlands) that there is almost no incentive to vote, your vote ends up in the huge pile of votes and is statistically meaningless. It’s even worse! Your vote has just as much voting power as any grandma’s vote, while you have been studying politics, dug into the political problems, did background research on all party members and spend 3 hours on a daily basis reading papers surfing the web to make a 100% sure that you suck in all the information which you think is needed to cast your (valuable) vote. The 90 year old grandma (not anyone in particular) gets up on voting day, goes to the voting booth and presses a button (she forgot her glasses so she was not 100% sure which button it was). Both votes have the same power. Conventional wisdom says that one person has one vote, every person is equal, that is the basics of Democracy, right?
But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote? (how you would facilitate this is a different story, and for the brevity of this post I will not go into this).
So for The Next Web Awards we thought… let’s experiment!* Let’s try to find a way to give you an incentive to vote and to vote in multiple categories (not only the one where your buddy is nominated). We identified 3 ways that should have a positive influence on the incentive to vote:
1. Instant reward
2. Some votes have more power than others (You can empower your vote)
3. Reward the “top” voters
So what we did is give the voter the possibility to get rewarded instantly. If you vote in all 8 categories we will double your voting power (we reward you for the time invested). But then there are other ways to empower your vote, but this time the voter is depending on others (your network or blog readers). You can invite your friends, colleagues or business contacts to cast a vote as well. If they do that, then your vote gets more power. Same story with your blog readers, if you put the widget on your site, all votes collected via that widget empower your votes.
We build in a maximum voting power. Any vote can count up to 12 times in the election.
1 vote = 1 vote
Vote in all categories and we will count your votes 2 times
Invite friends and multiply your power again 2 times
Install the widget and your voting power will be multiplied with a factor 3.
1 x 2 x 2 x 3 = 12
To top it off we introduce the top 100 voters and put them on the front page with a link to their site/blog.
If you’d translate this into the real world, you might be on to something…. at least it would make sense to give some voters more power than others (if they have more knowledge, can stimulate others to cast their vote, etc.). But I see this post is already ridiculously long, so I won’t even go there.
I’m curious how this works out. Via http://twitter.com/NextWeb we will give updates.
* The great thing about the web is that you can just do that
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