FAQ on Lottery System

During the last couple of conferences the lottery system must have been the most-complained-about issue on the SV evaluation forms. We think we may have a better way to solve the problems associated with the lottery, and these are explained on this page.

What is this lottery thing and why should I care?

The lottery has been used for several years to allocate the jobs on the last few days of the conference. For practical reasons these jobs cannot be planned in advance, but some jobs may be more popular than others, for instance because it is working a session with a good speaker. For that reason a first-come-first-served system is not fair.

What happened in the lottery system so far is that all SVs draw a lottery ticket with a number. Then, blocks of numbers are drawn, and people holding them are asked to step forward and sign up for jobs. This gives all people a fair chance of getting sought-after jobs. Usually this lottery is done during late afternoon for the following day.

What's this new proposal, then?

We've created a proposal for a new lottery system which is outlined below. Let us take a little time to motivate our proposal. First, the #1 complaint of SV's the past several years has been the old lottery system. Second, while there was a lot of complaining, there was next to nothing offered as an alternative system. So we brainstormed for a while and this is the best idea we came up with (there were many others we came up with--including not changing anything--that we rejected).

Here's how our proposed system would work (times are hypothetical):

[1] Computer sign-up. From 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, you would be allowed to request the slots you wanted to work the following day. This would be done on a computer. Further:

[1a] No signing up by proxy--you must sign up for your own slots. There will probably be some kind of password system to help ensure this.

[1b] You may not overbook yourself--that is, sign up for jobs that overlap, thinking you may not get one of them. This should limit the "shotgun" approach to signing up.

[1b] When signing up, you'd be able to find out how many other people had signed up for the slot you wanted.

[2] Lottery. After sign-up closed, Hans or I would log in to the system and have it run a lottery. This lottery would be based on the following principles:

[2a] If a time slot is not overbooked, there is no lottery for that time slot. It's silly to lottery for jobs where supply is greater than demand.

[2b] If a time slot is overbooked, the computer will randomly select however many people are needed for that job. (We might give preference to folks who have worked less than 15 hours or some such.)

[3] Posting. Hans or I would then post the results of the lottery to the main sign-up board. You could then find out what slots you got or didn't get in the lottery.

[4] Open sign-up. After the lottery, all remaining slots (if there are any) will be made available on a first-come, first-served basis.

This means there's a fairly generous window of time in which you can get at least some chance at any particular slot, you wouldn't have to wait around so much, underbooked slots wouldn't get lotteried, etc. There are probably drawbacks: for example, there might be a queue to get on the machine with the lottery program on it.

The software to run the lottery would be custom-built (probably by Hans) and this is not an entirely trivial process. Thus, we want to get feedback on this early (i.e. before I start writing code). If you think of a system you're convinced is much better, we'd love to hear it. If you can think of reasons why our proposal *won't* work, we'd love to hear that, too. If you think this is the best idea since sliced bread, hey, please don't hold back. :-)