This will be the 2nd year FLAME has experimented with a voting based system for Instructor Selection. They’ve attempted to improve the system to bring to you the best flow festival in the Southeaster US. It is clear that the team has worked very hard to make sure that selection is fair.
One main issue is that anyone can vote, not just people intending to go. That major flaw is still being ironed out. Some issues with last year’s system were that not all instructors taught 3 classes, and this was a bit sticky when it came to scheduling and compensation. So, from now on, instructors are at a 3 class minimum. Another issue was that the system highly favored poi with very few hoop courses. Once at the festival, the hoopers felt like there weren’t enough classes for them, and at times, there were 3 concurrent poi classes.
This led the organizers to try to find a better way to determine a teacher’s value to the festival. Firstly, was to lock in 10 headliner’s responsible for 26 of the 120 classes available: Baxter, Bags & Valentina, Chris Kelly, Marvin Ong, Doodle, Corey White, Lux Luminous, Sticky, and Spades.
Each day has 8 additional potential classes with 12 prop/tool tracks and they had to determine how many classes from each prop/tool type they needed.
The actual selection process runs something like the electoral college or AP classes with weighted votes which takes into account the greatest number of votes (153), the average number of votes of any instructor (52), the requested stipend, and the teacher’s overall value.
It was quite an ordeal, and several hugs and high fives, perhaps some ibuprofen is deserved of all the FLAME organizers for creating and successfully executing this system.
You can read the full article with all the maths and explanations from Drex.
Full list of instructors:
- Baxter
- Bags & Valentina
- Chris Kelly
- Marvin Ong
- Doodle
- Corey White
- Lux Luminous
- Sticky
- Spades
- Alex Branham
- Knight
- Willow
- Christina Berkshire
- Gonzo
- Casey Houle
- Jonah DiGirolamo
- Cosmic Greg Lee
- Jandro Nerdo
- Flo Fox
- Sennyo
- Kimberly Bucki
- Melissa Coffey
- Perkulator
- Becca Becker
- Brian Thompson
- Cassie
- Corey Glover
- Drex
- Echo
- Eli Harrod
- Kassandra Morrison
- Kyle Owen/Gib
- Nick Garcia
- Ninja Pyrate
- Spidey
- Spinnabel Lee
- Tesla
- Timbo Slice
- Tali
- Penelope Tate
- Patricia Farmer
- acob Wetzel,
- Carl Sparks