The SparqFest jury voting system was created long before COVID-19 to help festival jury members collaborate over the internet to select winners of festival awards. It enables you to define awards of various types, configuring voting rules, nominate selections, invite in your jury, and then let the jury loose to their task.
If you are not yet familiar with the different phases of voting with SparqFest, you should review our article “Voting Life Cycle” before continuing with this article.
Juried Award Configuration
The configuring of juried awards happens in “Judging” > “Jury Awards” in the Staff Portal.
The juried awards from Minnesota WebFest 2022
When you visit this subsection, you are presented with your list of juried awards. This list shows each award, its current judging state, and the deadline you have configured for the judging process. In the example above, judging is complete for all of the awards and the awards have been made public. Consequently, the winner column is showing the winners (blurred out in the screenshot above). If the winners were not public, the winner column would show “[Hidden]” and you would need to click “❮ show winners” to reveal the winners.
Creating a New Award
To create a new award, click “+ create”.
The “Award Name” is one of the few text fields in SparqFest that does not get translated. It should be the official name of the award as you promote it publicly. Because it is a brand, we don't translate it.
The description should tell audience members what the award represents so that they know the criteria on which they are judging the content.
We allow you to assign an award type to each award. For the most part, the award type field is just a way for you to classify an award. SparqFest does, however, place special meaning in the “Overall” awards as they receive preference for highlighting once the winners have been made public.
The “Named Recipient?” field indicates whether this award has a specific recipient (an individual or a sub-work such as a song). If you say “no”, the award is for the entire selection. If you say “yes”, then you must specify the recipient when making nominations.
Finally, you must provide a deadline for judging. The system will generate reminder emails as the deadline approaches to encourage the jury members to finalize their votes. Upon reaching the deadline, the system will attempt to tabulate a winner based on votes cast, regardless of whether the votes have been finalized.
This new award will now show up in your list of jury awards.
The Nomination Process
A new award starts in the “Nominating” state. At this time, you can change the basic information about the award, alter its deadline, and make nominations.
The Basic Info Tab
As with everything else in SparqFest, the “Basic Info” tab for a juried award enables you to define the basic information for the award, most of which you already configured when you created the award.
Right now, you have nothing to do on this tab. But you will come back to this tab to start the judging process and approve any winners.
The Nomination Rules Tab
To define how people are nominated for an award, you go to the “Nomination Rules” tab.
For juried awards, you will generally use “manual” nomination rules. In other words, you will specify the nominees one-by-one. If the award requires a named recipient, then you must use manual nomination rules as is the case for this Best Comedic Performance award.
The rules for this category are locked to “Manual” because of the named recipient
If there is no named recipient for this award, you have the option of selecting one of the automated nomination rules. An automated rule adds nominees based on the criteria you identify without the need for you to pick them one-by-one. The possible rules are:
all - Every selection in the festival is a nominee
genres - You pick a genre and every selection in that genre is a nominee
submission categories - You pick a submission category and every selection in that submission category is a nominee
You cannot mix and match automated rules with manual. As long as the category is in a nominating status, any selection added into the system that matches the rule will automatically become a nominee. Once judging has started, however, no changes can be made to the list of nominees even if a new matching selection is added to the system.
The Finalists Tab
You perform your initial entry of nominees for manual nominations in the “Finalists” tab. If, however, you opted for automated nomination rules, the nominees who match those criteria will show up in this tab. It may take a few moments after you first configure the automation rules for the matching nominees to show up. Similarly, if you change the nomination rules, it may take a few minutes for the nominee list to adjust to reflect the rules.
To make a manual nomination, simply click the “+ nominate” button and fill out the nomination form:
You can nominate as many nominees as you like. For awards with named recipients, the same selection can be nominated multiple times (e.g. two actors in the same selection competing for Best Comedic Performance).
The Runners-Up Tab
You can also make nominations in the “Runners-Up” tab. Runners-up and finalists are one way in which SparqFest enables you to respect the time of your jury members. SparqFest divides nominees for a juried award into “finalists” and “runners-up”. This distinction is never disclosed to the creators or the public. Both finalists and runners-up are considered official nominees for the category.
If, however, you have determined during the nomination process that a selection is worthy of a nomination while clearly not worthy of winning the award, you can use our runner-up functionality to prescreen the nominees for your jury. Consider, for example, a Best in Fest category with 10 nominees. That 15 hours of feature film content and thus a significant time commitment for your jury. If you know that only five of these nominees are truly worthy of a chance to win, you can break the category down into finalists and runners-up.
During the voting process, jury members are required to review only the finalists. They see who the runners-up are and have the ability to review them, but they cannot vote for those selections and do not need to rate them if you are using voting rules that demand a rating. This division saves the jury a lot of time while enabling you to reward selections that deserve the nomination, but just aren't winner quality.
When you add a nominee in either the Finalists or Runners-Up tab, they will be added as either a finalist or runner-up respectively. However, you have the ability to move a nomination from one group to the other by clicking the nomination and clicking either “Make Finalist” or “Make Runner-Up”.
NOTE: You will have to reload the page to see the change on the other tab.
The Voting Tab
The Voting tab is where you define the rules that will govern the voting process and invite judges to be part of the jury for this award.
Voting Rules
We currently support four options for voting:
- Majority
- Plurality
- Unanimous
- Average Rating
We also intend to add support for rubric-based voting in the near future.
The first three rule types simply involve each jury member casting a vote. They different solely based on what percentage of the vote is required for a selection to win.
- The “Majority” rule gives the award to the nominee with the most votes.
- The “Pluralty” rules gives the award to the nominee with 50% + 1 votes.
- The “Unanimous” rule requires all judges to agree on the winner.
Under the “Average Rating” rule, the judges do not pick winners. Instead, they rate each selection. The selection with the highest average rating among all the judges is then declared the winner.
Jury Members
Below the voting rules is the list of jury members assigned to this category. Inviting someone to serve on the jury works just like all other invitation-based systems in SparqFest.
Click on the invite button and fill out the form. If the judge is already in the system, they will be added to this category and receive an email notifying them that they have been asked to judge the category (you must refresh to see them in the list of judges). If, on the other hand, they are not registered yet with your festival, they will receive an invitation with an invitation code that they must accept before they will appear in the list of judges.
An example of an invitation email with an invitation code
Ask your judges to register before you send invitations
In general, the entire process works more smoothly if the judges are already registered with your festival before you start inviting them to judge. If SparqFest does not know about them, it has to wait for them to accept the invitation before you can begin the judging process. That wait can cause delays for the entire jury.
The Recommendations Tab
As you may have heard elsewhere, the core of SparqFest originated from a system built to run Minnesota WebFest back in 2017 and has grown since then. Minnesota WebFest has a two-phase voting system:
- Phase I - Judging for genre awards
- Phase II - Judging for all other awards (in particular, skill awards)
The screeners who determine the Minnesota WebFest Official Selections in FilmFreeway make the nominations for phase I. The jury members judging the genre awards make the nominations for phase II.
The “Recommendations” tab makes that two-phase voting process work.
The “Recommendations” tab has a single setting for “open nominations”
There is just a single setting on this tab: “Open Nominations”. If you set “Open Nominations” to “Yes”, then any jury engaged in voting for another category can recommend a nominee to this category as long as this category remains in its “Nominating” state.
Let's look at a concrete example. At this time, I have a set of judges voting on the “Best Comedy” award and a “Best Comedic Performance” award in the “Nominating” state. As the “Best Comedy” jury watches the individual nominees to that category and encounters great comedic performances, they can make recommendations to the “Best Comedic Performance” category.
Note that these are just recommendations; they are not automatically turned into nominees. Members of the festival staff review the recommendations and determine if should become true nominees.
SparqFest support is required
As of the writing of this document, you don't actually have access to the list of recommendations. You need to contact SparqFest support to get an exported list of recommendations. In the near future, however, the recommendations will be visible in the “Recommendations” tab and you will be able to convert a recommendation into a nominee straight from this tab.
The Laurels Tab
The final tab is the “Laurels” tab. Here, you can upload a number of laurels for nominees and winners. The nominee laurels are used as the icon to represent the award throughout the system and on the public web site. You saw one use of this when you were looking at the list of awards when you first came to the “Jury Awards” subsection.
We also make these laurels available to the filmmakers who have been nominated or who have one this award once you make the nominees public and the winners public, respectively.
What's in a laurel?
Every festival handles laurels differently. We've tried to create an improvement on the FilmFreeway laurel gallery, which is really good only for Official Selection laurels.
Each filmmaker has a “Laurel” section in their Creator Portal for their selections. They see only the laurels relevant to them. All selections see your Official Selection laurels (uploaded to the edition settings). Creators also see the nomination laurels for the categories to which they have been nominated AND where you have made the nominees for that category public. Similarly, creators see the winner laurels for the categories they have won (AND, again, where you have made the winner in that category public).
For each type of laurel, you have space for
- a black laurel
- a white laurel
- a color laurel
- two alternate laurels
By creating these different values, we are giving you control over your brand so creators don't mess up your laurels trying to create a color laurel with odd colors. We thus recommend that the black, white, and color laurels have transparent backgrounds.
The Judging Process
Once you have configured the awards, it's time to let the jury start voting. You do this by going back to the Basic Info tab where you start the judging process. Click the “Start Judging” button and then “Save” your changes.
You cannot start judging unless all of the following are true:
- At least one of the judges has accepted their invitation
- There is at least one finalist assigned to the category
- You have set all of the important information like award name, description, judging deadline, etc.
If one of those criteria are not true, then the “Start Judging” button will be visible, but disabled.
For the example category in the video above, only one judge has accepted their invitation. In this scenario, the system will warn you that you have only one judge and ask if you wish to continue. If you intend one judge to determine the winner, then everything is OK. If you are waiting on other judges to accept, however, you run the risk of the one judge who has accepted “finalizing” their vote and the system accidentally calculating a winner off that vote.
Nominee Announcements
Perhaps you noticed the “Make Nominees Public?” setting on the Nomination Rules tab earlier. It was disabled and set to “No”. You can't make nominees public until after you start the judging process. Now that you have started the judging process, this option is available to you:
In fact, it's now the only thing you can do on the Nomination Rules tab. You can no longer alter the nomination rules. Also, since there's no winner yet, you still cannot make the winners public.
You do not have to make the nominees public
Nothing in the system requires nominees to be public. If you keep them private, then the system will not mention anywhere that a given selection is a nominee to a category. In fact, you can later make the winner public without making the nominees public. This approach is typical for categories in which everyone is technically a nominee.
You always have the option to stop the judging process and return the system to the “Nominating” state. You can then make any necessary changes and re-start voting.
The Jury Experience
Once you start the judging process, each jury member will receive an email telling them that the category is ready for judging.
They can then login to the Jury Portal where they will see all categories they are expected to judge. They can also see a historical record of their participation as jury members in past editions of the festival.
The initial view for the judge is in their dashboard where they see the progress they are making with current judging tasks. This view also shows you another use of the laurels you uploaded during in the previous section.
In this case, judging for the Best Comedic Performance category is past due, but the judge is in the middle of voting for the other categories with their due dates and where they are in the judging process shown clearly.
The judge can click a category to start the review process or go to one of the other sections to get a more traditional view of things.
The “Awards” section shows all categories they have been assigned to in a list view. They have the option to view the current edition or past editions.
The “Nominees” section enables them to see all of the nominees for all of the categories they are judging. This view is useful to judges assigned to multiple categories so that they can focus on going through each nomination before considering their votes.
The judge's view of a category to which they have been assigned
Judges have tabs that give them a look at where they stand in the vote, all of the finalists, all of the runners-up, and the other judges. In the image above, the judge has not made a pending vote nor have they watched any of the finalists. Once they have watched all of the finalists, the “Finalists” tab will turn green and receive a check mark.
The following video gives you a feel for the review process for a judge:
This judge now has a pending vote:
Because this particular category is past due and there is a pending vote, the system will go ahead soon go ahead and tabulate a winner without the judge finalizing a vote. For a normal category in a normal judging situation, however, they judge will need to finalize their vote.
Ideally, judges will wait to finalize their votes until they have conferred with the other members of their jury. This is especially true for categories that require unanimity.
Calculating a Winner
The system is always managing a running tabulation of who the “winner” is. The final tabulation occurs when:
- Enough judges have finalized their votes that no further votes will impact the outcome
- The judging deadline has passed and there is at least one vote (pending or finalized)
Depending on the votes, there is either a clear winner or the category is deadlocked.
If there is a clear winner, the status of the award switches to “Approving”.
If no nominee has the votes/rating required to win by the rules you configured earlier, the status of the award switches to “Tiebreaking”.
In both situations, an email goes out to festival staff in charge of voting and the judges for the category notifying the recipients of the status change.
The Tiebreaking Process
A category enters the “Tiebreaking” state when a judging deadline has passed with no nominee meeting the criteria established by the voting rules to win. There are two ways to break a tie:
- Assign a tiebreaker judge to the category
- Break the tie yourself
You add a tiebreaker judge the same as any other judge, except you mark them as a tiebreaker.
SparqFest support may be required for tiebreaker judges
At the time of the writing of this article, the tiebreaker flag was not available in the invitation dialog. If this is still the case for you, send your invitation and ask SparqFest support to flag the new judge as a tiebreaker.
The key difference is that this judge can only choose among the deadlocked selections. They then pick a winner.
The Approval Process
Once a category has a winner via normal voting or tie-breaking, it enters the “Approving” state and requires approval. You cannot make the winner of a category public until it has been approved and reaches the “Complete” state.
Click the “Approve/Override” button to approve or override the jury decision
During the “Approving” phase you have two options:
- Approve the decision of the judges
- Override the decision of the judges
If you approve the winner, the category now becomes “Complete”.
If you override, you will be asked to name the real winner and the category becomes “Complete”.
Getting Ready for the Awards Ceremony
With all the voting finished, the winners approved, and the status “Complete”, you are ready for your awards ceremony.
You can export all categories to a spreadsheet that you can use to order any awards and print your winner envelops. At this point, however, the winners are still otherwise secret within SparqFest. After you have announced the winners, you can come back to the “Nomination Rules” tab and make the winner public.
The home page for the Mediterranean theme highlights the overall award winners
Once you make the winner public, several things happen:
- The selection is listed as the winner on their SparqFest selection page
- The winners of “Overall” categories may be promoted on the site (varies based on site theme)
- The creators behind the winning selection will have access to the winner laurel in the Creator Portal