[Closed] Voting for 1st mini-poll now open!

[Laura, Mod]

The 2016 Reading Challenge will continue the concept of this year's challenge, with 52 weekly topics. Users then choose a book fitting each topic in order to complete the challenge.

How it will work:
The topics for the 2016 RC list will be determined through 13 mini-polls. Each user will vote for their favorite 4 topics in each mini-poll, which will then add up to the 52 topics (13 polls x 4 topics/poll=52 weekly topics). Suggestions for each poll will be open for one week (or until 20 suggestions are received) and then opened up for voting for one week. This timeframe allows for a completed list at the beginning of December and, for each month, we'll try to have one category with a short book, so it will be easier to catch-up.

First poll:
Voting: June 14-June 20

Rules:
- Each person can take the survey one time.
- First column: pick up for 4 themes. One, two, or three choices is fine if that's all that interests you.
- Second column: Rank your choices from most (1) to least (20) preferred.

The survey column is labeled a bit confusing but rank 1-20 and wording will be changed for future polls.

Survey Link

[Zaz, Mood Minion]

The double poll is a nice idea, I'd a hard time to rank some topics :D
I'm very curious to see the results!

[Laura, Mod]

I tried to replicate the format that Sophie used in the "2016?" thread. I thought it was a thorough idea :)

[Marina]

One of the topics is "one book from each continent". Is the idea that we should read 7 books in one week?

[Laura, Mod]

I personally think it would have to be treated the same as the trilogy week, so it would account for 7 weeks in the challenge. I think a lot of people would struggle with 7 books in a week.

But if that theme is chosen then I think it have to be put up for discussion as a group.

[Marina]

I would struggle with it, that's why I'm asking :)
I like the idea and it's actually one of my favorite topics of the 20, but if it means I'll have to read 7 books in a week, I don't think I'll put my vote on that one.

[Laura, Mod]

I'm guessing that most people would lean towards 7 weeks for the exact same reason ;)

[Anastasia]

Thank you for adding in the ranking piece. It made me feel that no matter what is picked that I truly had a say in it.

[Corynne]

I'm a little confused on the ranking. Are we ranking all of the options, or just the four we picked? Thanks!

[Anne]

I have trouble understanding it as well, if we pick just 4 themes and rank them wouldn't it be from 1 to 4 ?
If we have to rank all the topics then we'll use from 1 to 20.
It's written "Rank of four picks" in the second column hence the trouble understanding if we rank just our picks or 20
So what must we do ? Just pick some topics OR rank every topic ?

[Laura, Mod]

That's my mistake. I was deciding whether to rank just the four or all 20 and I decided if it was all 20 then I'd be able to see if a lot of people ranked the top 4 really low (if it was polarized). So I must have failed to change the the question wording after deciding.

You're ranking all the way from 1-20. Apologies!

[Corynne]

No worries! I just redid the survey, thanks!

[Anne]

No problem ^^ thanks for working on the poll !

[Peter]

Thanks for your work on the polls. It looks really good!

[Charity]

I just redid the survey as well. Please ignore the first response.

[Peter]

Charity wrote: "I just redid the survey as well. Please ignore the first response."

I don't think there is a way for them to associate any specific response to you because it's just a link, not a log in, so they won't be able to discount your first response.

[Laura, Mod]

The surveys are pretty straight forward to create so I don't mind :) But if anyone wants to be involved and create a future survey just let me know.

The site is surprisingly detailed so I can pick out the duplicates based on ID numbers and delete the first one. So feel free to fix them if you ranked only the top 4.

[Peter]

I stand corrected...that's pretty neat that you are able to do that - and that you can filter out any extra votes people submit if needed.

I have a question though - what happens if someone puts a duplicate number in the ranking? Or leaves some blank? I only ask, because I found it a little tedious ranking all 20...there were about 10 I was interested in and the rest I disliked pretty equally and didn't want them at all.

So, do any duplicate "20s" or blank ranks default to a rank or 20 or is there a way to do this in future polls? I just found for me personally, everything past 10 was equally unwanted and ranks 11-19 were the same as a a rank of 20 to me.

EDIT: also, I understand it's a bit of a time commitment to set the polls up. If you need a hand let me know, I'd be glad to help out. My work/sleep schedule is irregular so I can't commit to doing all of them, but maybe we can coordinate so I can help you out with a few of them.

[Laura, Mod]

I'm definitely not an expert in the site (it was suggested by another user) but it appears to break the results down by theme and then provide each answer. So for the first suggested theme, it gives each user's answer (i.e. 1,4,5,10). That's entirely hypothetical. The suggestion was that I average all answers to get an average rank for each theme and choose the top 4. Ideally, if someone mistakenly enters a duplicate they would be close together so it wouldn't really largely affect the mean. If there's 100 responses a difference of 1 rank in 1 answer won't really affect much. If it's left blank entirely then I believe their answer just would not be listed for that particular theme.

As for the survey composition, the only solution for that I can think of is having the second column be "4 least favorite themes" so then the themes with the most votes here would be removed from consideration. And the top 4 would be chosen based upon the top 4 votes in the first column (excluding bottom 4).

If a lot of people aren't feeling the composition of the survey then we definitely change it in the remaining 12.

[Peter]

Now I'm more confused, lol.

How are the top four choices being chosen? At first I thought they were being picked by the top 4 options that receive the most "picks" in from the selection option. Now it sounds like they are being chosen by averaging their accumulated ranks and choosing the four with the highest average.

I'm confused as to the purpose of both options, the "top picks" and "the ranks". It seems like only one or the other will be used to determine the outcome.

[Laura, Mod]

There were a a lot of suggestions provided for the type of poll. I pulled the one that was posted from another user, which seemed to be popular. She included both columns so I was mainly just going off that one.

I figured that the top 4 column would allow me to see if people preferred less than 4 of the themes since ranking forces people to choose a top 4. If there's a huge gap between the number of votes for, say, the third theme and the fourth theme then I would open up to the group to see if they just want to choose 3 themes from that poll instead of 4. If a ton of people voted for 3 themes and then the number suddenly drops then that may mean that a lot of people only voted for 3 themes. Some people were concerned that a batch of less favorable themes would get pushed through just for the sake of choosing so I was trying to address that concern.

The final picks from that mini-poll would be chosen from the rank column by averaging the ranks. That's an attempt to allow those to be heard who ranked a popular theme as 20 since it would affect a mean.

We have 13 polls so we can always fix any concerns or kinks with later polls :) The results now seem to be showing some pretty clear preference.

[Peter]

Ohhhhh, ok I see now. That makes sense. Sorry for being dense about it.

[Laura, Mod]

It's definitely all pretty confusing. Every time I reread the 2016? Thread I realize I read something wrong.

I think it's going to work out well with this poll because there's a pretty clear top 4 but I'm definitely open to suggestions for poll 2!

[Peter]

I'm looking forward to seeing the results...only have to wait 6 more days, lol.

That's good though if there seems to be a clear top 4. Tweaks and adjustments can be implemented if needed later on, but it's encouraging to know the process is working on our first attempt.

[Grace Meredith]

I accidentally submitted twice. Whoops. I didn't realize you have to rank all 20... that was pretty confusing.

I'm so glad that my suggestion was in their! Just the first and last book of your favorite series! Thanks so much, challenge mods!

[Anne]

Thanks Laura for explaining the polls it's pretty neat to have a back up poll already done if we were to pick less than 4 themes in the end ^^

[Silvia]

I submitted twice too, but the first one is wrong because I ranked just the four I had chosen.

[Francesca]

Silvia wrote: "I submitted twice too, but the first one is wrong because I ranked just the four I had chosen."

I did the same thing! Had to submit it a second time, ranking all of them.

[Camilla]

What happens to my answers if I rank only a few of the tasks? There are only two tasks that I'd like to vote for, the remaining 18 are equally uninteresting. Am I able to vote for only two tasks?

[Laura, Mod]

It will let you enter any number between 1 and 20 or no number at all. The point of the ranking is allowing people to be heard if they really don't like a theme. So if some the majority votes for one theme, in a traditional voting system that would be pushed through. But if quite a few people rank it as 20 then in a ranking system, that theme might not get placed in the final list even though the majority voted for it. So it's a way to try and prevent themes from getting pushed through if some people really didn't like it.

If you leave them blank then your answers just wouldn't be listed on the particular theme. My results show each theme and each rank it received.

[Laura, Mod]

I've gone through and deleted any duplicate surveys so no worries there :)

I apologize again for the bad wording in the title of the column and making people submit twice! I will definitely change that for the second poll, assuming everyone wants to go with the same format again.

[Marina]

I get the idea with the ranking from 1 to 20, but wouldn't it be better if we answered how interested we are in each topic on a scale from 1 to 5?
I think that would give a better impression of how popular or unpopular each topic is, but I don't know if it's possible to make such questions?

[Laura, Mod]

We could do the same survey with one column and a scale like one person suggested in the 2016? thread. It would be the same as it is now but with a different scale. People would just enter their chosen number for each theme and then I would go through and average them.

This is the scale that was proposed:
1 - I don't like this theme
2 - I'm not excited but why not
3 - Yes it could be a good idea
4 - Absolutely, it's a great theme.

My concern with such a small scale is that it may result in many themes having the same average or there being a very small difference between themes. One theme may have an average of 3.12 while another has an average of 3.11. It would be hard to conclude that it's more preferred if the difference is so small. Hopefully that makes sense. I like the general idea of that type of scale but not sure we could extrapolate an actual top 4 from it.

[Laura, Mod]

What if we did something like

1: my top 4 themes
10: I'm not excited about it but why not?
20: I don't like this theme

Since people are saying it's hard to rate the in between then that gives one number as the "in between"/no preference but allows people to dislike or really like themes. It also creates a big enough gap to allow a meaningful average.

[Zaz, Mood Minion]

It doesn't work if you like very much more than 4 topics :p
I think the scale can be a problem if there are several great topics, I prefer a rank.

[Marina]

I don't see how the scale would be a problem. You would still have to choose your favorite 4 topics.
As it stands now I've rated the topics from 1-20 but several of them I really weren't interested in. But you can't see that from the ranking, you can only see in which order I prefer the topics.

But we're never going to find a solution that suits everybody, so I'll just wait and see what 52 topics will be picked and then decide wether I want to continue the challenge next year.

[Brittany (booksandbottles)]

Marina wrote: "I don't see how the scale would be a problem. You would still have to choose your favorite 4 topics.
As it stands now I've rated the topics from 1-20 but several of them I really weren't intereste..."


Marina, I can agree that there weren't very many topics in this list that I was super excited about either...but I figure at least when the list of 52 books comes out it's not like this is some super strict class that we are going to completely criticize you if you stray from the list...we could always make a "misc" folder if you chose to change a topic to better suit your interests. The point is to have fun and read things that you may never have picked up if it wasn't for a suggestion in this group!! I promise no one will be mad at you or be mean if you choose not to read certain weeks! :)

[Laura, Mod]

I really like the idea of a miscellaneous folder. The main topic could list the suggestions we received (there's already a master list) and people could pull a category from there if they want to deviate from the main challenge. Then they can just start a thread in the miscellaneous folder with their book title like we do now.

[Brittany (booksandbottles)]

Laura wrote: "I really like the idea of a miscellaneous folder. The main topic could list the suggestions we received (there's already a master list) and people could pull a category from there if they want to d..."


Maybe, after we get all the polls done and the final list compiled, we could see how people feel and then talk about setting up the extra miscellaneous folder. I know that I definitely don't want to read a book about sports haha!

[Bana AZ]

Thank you for those in charge of this! I'm so excited to see the results even if I am way behind my reading for this year.

[Carol]

I've voted for my favourites. Can't wait to see the results to see if others like the same. :)

[Francesca]

Ana wrote: "Thank you for those in charge of this! I'm so excited to see the results even if I am way behind my reading for this year."

Me too! I'm really far behind this year but I started the challenge about half way through January so I was already behind and haven't managed to catch up. I'm hoping next year I'll be able to start straight away and hopefully I'll stay on track!

[Brittany (booksandbottles)]

I know how you feel Francesca!! I started the last week of February and haven't managed to catch up yet either. I'm hoping that I can catch up in the next little bit now that I've got my list *almost* completely filled out and can read all my favorites which should catch me up and maybe even put me ahead! lol

[Bec]

I didn't rank them all so I'm going to do the survey again too.

[Sophie]

Marina wrote: "I get the idea with the ranking from 1 to 20, but wouldn't it be better if we answered how interested we are in each topic on a scale from 1 to 5?
I think that would give a better impression of how..."

I like the idea of being able to replace a category you're less interested in by something else!

[Anastasia]

It's great to see that you want to do this properly using your time and getting it done well. :) I also voted though I'm not sure how much I'll be able to read next year.. This is interesting anyways

[Laura, Mod]

I'll compile the answers first thing tomorrow morning and post the results as soon as I'm done (before noon EST).

So as long as responses are entered before tomorrow morning then that's perfectly fine :)