A whole event, start to finish

This walks the open demo event through its life: set up, teams, submissions, the deadline, judging, calibration, results. It’s also the script of the five-minute demo video. Keep two browser windows open (a normal one and a private one) so you can be two people at once.

1. The organizer sets it up

Sign in as organizer@ballotbench.local, open My events, then Manage next to Demo Hack (open).

• Dates and settings. Four windows: submissions, judging, voting and (implicitly) results. k, reviews per project, defaults to 3.
• Tracks and prizes. Add a track called Hardware; add a prize for it.
• Rubric. Three criteria to start: functionality, quality, innovation, each 1 to 5, weight 1. Give functionality weight 2. The weights can change freely until the first score comes in; after that the database refuses, so nobody can tune weights after seeing who they favour.
• Invite a judge. Under Invite judges and organizers, pick Judge, tick a track, and make a link. It’s shown once and works once. The portal sends no email; send the link however you like.

2. Participants form a team

In the private window, create an account, then My events → join as a participant on the demo event.

• Create team, then Make an invite link. Open it signed in as someone else and they join. The link then stops working; a team can’t grow past the event’s size limit, even if two people accept at the same moment.
• Start your project. Save it as a draft: only the team and the organizers can see it. Submit it and it appears in the public gallery. You can keep editing until the deadline.

3. The deadline

As the organizer, move Submissions close to a minute from now and save. Wait for it. Back in the participant’s window, try to save the project: the answer is That window is closed, with the time. The same happens through the API (a 409 with the close time) and in the admin. Behind all three, a trigger in the database refuses the write on its own clock, so even a bug in the app couldn’t let a late edit through.

4. Judging

As the organizer, open Hand out reviews. The preview shows which judge gets which project: every project gets k reviews, the idlest judge picks next, nobody reviews their own team or outside their tracks. Apply it.

Sign in as the judge. Your reviews lists only your projects and how long they’ll take. Each has a scoresheet: one bubble per score per criterion, a comment only the organizers see, Save draft and Submit review (after submitting, only Resubmit). If you know the team, I have a conflict steps you aside; the organizer sees the project needs another judge.

Meanwhile, the organizer’s Progress page shows each judge’s assigned, started and finished counts and which projects are short of reviews. Keep this page up to date refreshes it every 20 seconds.

5. Calibration

Open Calibration and results and run it. For the fixture event this is where it gets interesting:

• jdg_07 gave every project 4 on everything. They’re listed as gave every project the same score and carry no weight.
• jdg_01 and jdg_23 wrote one review each: nothing to compare with, so no weight either.
• The ranking shows raw rank, calibrated rank, and the range each rank could plausibly be. On the fixture these ranges are wide, and the page says why: the judges agree no more than chance would.

Reading the calibration page goes through it line by line.

6. Publish

Publish results freezes the ranking to this calibration run. Until then, the results page and API answer 404 to everyone but the organizers. The public page shows each project’s calibrated score, its plausible rank range, and the fingerprint of the scores it came from.

7. A community vote

In Settings, set Voting mode to signed-in accounts and put the voting window after submissions close (the portal refuses it earlier). While it’s open, Community vote shows how many ballots are in and who cast them, with flags for crowded networks, brand-new accounts and identical ballots, but not the per-project tallies: those appear once voting closes.

A voter opens Vote on the event: the projects come in an order made for them, they spread 25 credits (n votes on a project cost n²), and they can’t vote for their own team. An account has to confirm its email address first: the link is sent at sign-up, and with the network off it lands in the outbox, which the site admin reads under Admin → Outbound emails.

Results can’t be published while the vote is open. Close it, publish, and the public results show the community votes next to the judges’ ranking.

8. Export

Exports has a CSV for every stage: registrations, teams, projects, assignments, every score, the calibrated results, each judge’s calibration, and the audit log with its hash chain. Every download is itself in the audit log.