Judging/Transparency at iGEM

A note on transparency, the judging process, and judge affiliations

There have been some enquiries about judging in recent weeks that should be addressed.

Judges are recruited from amongst team instructors. iGEM has one of the largest communities of synthetic biology researchers in the world. Consequently, the instructors are ideally suited to assess iGEM projects. Instructors know how much work teams put into each project over the summer and have a good idea what is possible. This makes them the best people to assess other iGEM projects.

Judges are scheduled so that there are no conflicts of interest. A judge instructor will not assess the wiki, presentation, poster and in the majority of cases, the track for their team.

Within these parameters, the judges are assigned randomly using assignment software at iGEM Headquarters.

Last year, custom software was developed to implement judging based on voting rather than on “argumentation and acquiescence”. This system allows all judges to cast their votes independently, based on their own assessment of each team. All judges across all regions complete a ballot according to the same set of criteria and values as determined by the head judging committee. The custom voting system is based on work by Michel Balinski as described in his book: “Majority Judgment”.

There are several “categories” in the ballot, each broken down into individual “aspects”. These options were determined by the head judging committee to represent core values in iGEM for each award. There is a category for each of the special awards with an overall “project” category and an “advancement” section.

The Project category contains aspects that apply to all parts of your project; these represent the core values for an iGEM team from "Is this work based on standard parts?" to "What is the potential impact of this work?". The judges’ votes on these aspects are tallied and determine the special awards and finalists.

Additionally, this year we have created an Advancement category solely to allow judges to vote on whether s/he believes a team should advance to the World Championship Jamboree. These votes will be tallied and will determine the advancing teams.

It is important to understand that voting on special awards, finalists, and advancing teams are all independent of one another.

With an electronic vote tallying system, comes less visibility for each individual judge. Voting in iGEM is secret, but not anonymous. In this way all judges get an equal vote on the performance of the teams they have observed. After voting is complete and the ballots have closed, the Head Judging Committee will ratify the results.

Finally, in keeping with ideas on transparency of evaluation, the names of the judges and their team affiliations are posted below.

iGEM HQ and the Head Judging Committee