FACTS

Fairness

Awareness and reduction of bias and personal preference.

Judges need to be trusted and respected. They need to demonstrate as best they can, that they are free from any bias, which comes in many forms. 

Accountability

Tracking the judges' decisions to ensure quality and fairness.

Judging systems should allow decisions to be tracked and for any major deviations to be identified and questioned. It is an imperative that every judge should be fair and therefore also accountable for any of his or her decisions.

Consistency

Coherence in terminology and judging.

In the past, judges were chosen based on name or reputation with no scrutiny or analysis of their judging ability or decision-making processes. As a result, no uniformity was present in judging. Although judgments of any performance art or sport is always also a matter of subjective thought, there should still be some form of unity in what is valued and the meaning of those values. Some agreed conventions need to be implemented or the value of judging will be unclear.

This means that training in a consistent ‘base level’ of terms and perspective is necessary to establish an agreed upon and reproducible approach.

Transparency

Honesty and clarity of assessment for judges, competitors and audience during and after the competition.

The system must be able to provide feedback for the participants and the audience. By means of a system we can express and evaluate the performance and thereby have the means to provide detailed feedback. This enables the performer and the audience to learn what values are rated and the reasons for judges' decisions. It also allows the judge to make meta-observations which aids self-reflection and facilitates development of their judging ability.

Transparency allows for the education of all involved. 

Statistics

Ongoing feedback, assessment and review to improve quality over time.

To develop a mature system and scene attention must be paid to improving the processes and providing training and support those who undertake the important duty of judging. As more and more statistics are collected we hope that we can identify if there are any specific deficiencies in how judging is done and if any improvement can be made in the process. Over time perspectives change and this must also be reflected in any system.

Threefold and Trivium are just a start.