Tuesday 3 August 2010

Yoosk Hustings....how the questions put to the candidates will be chosen.

As the Yoosk Hustings charge into their second week, the quantity and quality of questions is really heartening as our recent article for LabourList shows.

But as the race for votes to be assured of a place in the top five for each candidate, and therefore a place in the interview, hots up; now is a vital time to serve a couple of reminders about the manner in which the final questions will be chosen.

We at Yoosk pride ourselves on being entirely impartial and democratic about our crowdsourcing process. There are countless crowd-sourced interviews out there, but the majority of questions still live and die by the sword of the interviewer who cherry-picks the questions provided by the masses.
We hold firm to our principles of letting you not only pose the questions, but vote for which ones should make the final cut, and we would always let you have the last say.

So the issue here is not one of editorial selection, but one of repetition.

Some questions already asked of the Labour candidates are duplicates of previous ones. A greater number tackle the exact same issue from a slightly different angle.

Should it occur that two questions in the final top five be on an identical issue, we will choose one or combine the two and then add the sixth most popular question to the list.

By the same logic, should a question on one particular issue be asked of the whole panel, we will then look over any identical questions asked of any individual candidate as they will already be covering that topic in their five 'all panel' answers.

By no means let this dissuade you from posing your question if you feel it is original enough to hold its own and earn enough votes, but first see if someone else has already asked it, and perhaps choose instead to lend them your vote.

The second point is a much simpler, and much more inclusive, addition. We know that even if it doesn't receive enough votes to be asked on camera, each and every question is the most important question to at least one person.

So we will do our best to get every question answered and after each interview will leave behind as many of the excess questions as possible in the hope that each campaign team may at least email us a text answer explaining their candidate's position.

Any answers we do receive will, of course, be posted on the Yoosk website.

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