Competition poster by Jakub Stepien Hakobo
All posters are now online, and can be voted on until May 25, 2007.
This, in my opinion, is an interesting experiment. The question whether poster competitions could, or should, be judged online is raised often, and is usually rejected. While it is true that online judging would have disadvantages (a one square meter sized piece of paper can often not be adequately reduced to a small image on a computer screen, the group dynamics of decision making within a live jury is absent, it is less fun for the jury members to stay at home, and so on), but it also has important advantages (it is much cheaper and more democratic).
Online selection of favorite pictures by an open audience is already well established, and regularly applied to several hundred millions of pictures in galleries like flickr.com, which shows for each picture the number of times it has been viewed, and been selected as a favorite. The procedure is also firmly rooted in the culture of Web 2.0 where audience participation is the rule.
This is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to apply online judging to a large international poster competition.
From the competition rules, it is not quite clear to me what role the jury plays here,
or whether the internet voting just serves as a preselection. Also, I find it not so easy to leaf through 22 screens to pick a
winner from 500 posters. However, online judging will certainly be improved in time, and I have no doubt that it will be become more widespread.
Please give it a try!