Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Who would pick the lottery winner? And which names should go into the hat?
|
You would!
I have no idea if lottery will ever win a month or if all of you'd want to do it the way the lit club does it, but since the person who nominated it linked to the lit club's last lottery month, here's the process there so maybe the details will be a bit clearer to how the lit club does it at least -
(Click here to see the last lit club lottery thread)
Nominations are opened for a period of time for people to throw their hat into the ring.
Anyone at all is allowed to enter. The first year HIMS is right, it was limited to people who participated recently, but this last year it was changed to anyone at all. I didn't want to exclude anyone, and I didn't want to bother checking the eligibility of everyone who enters (it was complicated the year we did have restrictions and some people didn't even know whether they themselves were eligible). Changing it to letting anyone enter was just simpler and more open.
Well, almost anyone can enter; anyone who won in the last year is ineligible (so basically, the last winner is ineligible but everyone else is eligible). But since this club is bigger and if many people enter each time, I could see this club saying anyone who won before is ineligible for a longer amount of time, such as three or five years, or even just permanently ineligible after winning.
Once nominations are over, I assign each entrant a number starting with one through however many people entered based on the order they posted entering the lottery, and post the list of entrants with their assigned numbers.
Then I go to random.org and (this may be obvious if you've used the site before) on the front page on the right, there's already a simple pre-made form to randomly generate a number. It has the minimum box as "1" and the maximum box and "100". I just change "100" to the number of entrants, then click "generate". Then I post the resulting number and declare a winner based on who was assigned that number.
The winner then has a certain amount of time to post a selection. The requirements for what can be selected are the same as for any other month (never won a month before, etc.). Once the winner posts a selection, the club runner confirms it. If the selection doesn't meet requirements, then the winner would still have until their time ran out to select another instead.
If the winner doesn't post a confirmed selection in the allotted time for some reason, then the month becomes a "second chance" month since that way I can quickly throw up a poll without nominations, but so far we haven't had to. Since the general club already have a built-in second chance month, I'm not sure what the solution would be here (maybe choosing another winner who has to post asap?).
And that's it. The first year's lottery rules were more complicated and strict than this but things were much simplified after that and it works better.
There are some possibilities to keep in mind - such as the winner discussing possible selections before choosing and basing their choice on a few people who might quickly respond, a winner trying to get particular people's opinions before choosing, a winner being unclear and confusing in what they post, a winner making a choice but then changing their mind and posting something different, a winner not understanding completely or not posting in time then complaining afterwards, a winner trying to "give" their win to someone else, a winner trying to make mischief with the selections, other people being very critical of the selection, arguments springing up from the selection, etc. We had a slight problem or two the first year with the lottery, nothing major, all smoothed in the end, but I could see a larger possibility for some of these problems for a lottery month in the general book club.
As a side note, a bit of a digression, at first I wasn't sure people would trust me with randomly picking a number for the winner without verification, so I also found another site where I could have results e-mailed without knowing the winner beforehand (you'd be amazed how hard it is to find something like that, for free at least). It was some fantasy football site I think, lol, but it had a random draft form or something similar where you could enter picks and e-mails, and the system would send an e-mail to everyone with the picks mixed up and randomly listed in an order (all e-mails would get the same randomly mixed order). Since I have no idea about fantasy football I didn't understand what it was meant to be for exactly, but the result was that I could enter lottery participants' names and someone else's e-mail to verify the results, and then declare the first person randomly listed in the e-mail as the winner. And I could e-mail as many people as were interested, and we'd all get the same e-mail with the same list in the same random order, and there's no way I could alter the results beforehand since the list is mixed as the e-mails are sent (so I couldn't, say, get a result and then have it e-mailed).
The first lottery months, I offered that if anyone wanted to verify the results, to let me know and PM an e-mail, and then I would've used that fantasy football site for results. But no one ever did want to verify results, so I figured they trusted me, so I just used random.org instead since it's so much easier, heh.
As another side note digression, it's interesting to see the lottery end up here and the journey it's taken from how it first started - When I started the lit club, there was a thread for people to suggest how we'd do it since it was smaller than this general club. People had lots of ideas, but about half of the posters at that time in that thread were interested in not having any nominations or votes, and instead just let a different member pick a book each month.
I and others weren't fans of this idea for various reasons, but I didn't want to just shut the idea out completely since many of the posters supported it. So I came up with the compromise idea of having some months each year devoted to a member choosing the selection so everyone would get a bit of what they wanted. I debated how many months should be devoted to this, anywhere from two to six, and settled on three.
But then, how to decide who picks during those months? I'm certainly not going to choose who picks. So I came up with the lottery. After the first year, since the lit club is small and most people now seem to prefer nominations and voting, I cut the lottery down to one month a year which seems good.
And now the idea's jumped over here. I don't know if it will ever win a month in any version, but if it does, it will be an interesting month to see how many people enter and how people react to it.