Another Ranking Suggestion

[tekbspa!tavan at uunet.UU.NET]

OK, lots of people agree that a way to rank contesters
would be exciting.  There are no good ideas on how to
make it predictive of future performance like chess and
I sense well considered disdain for a handicapping system that
pretends to level a very uneven playing field.  Some good
ideas are floating on a tiered system where you work your
way up a ladder through successive performance.  I think
we could combine several objectives with an integrated
hierarchy of perks:  Event Performance Rank, Annual
Achievement, Lifetime Achievement, Cumulative Rank.  We could
implement any or all depending mainly on publication
space since compute power is free. 

*** Rethink this ***

Event Performance Rank
----------------------

For each contest of substance, have a way of awarding
ranking points.  Points earned are in no way connected
to contest awards which remain the sole responsibility
of the contest sponsor.

Have a ranking administrator, preferably an organization
or publication, determine the points available for each
event.  I would recommend that two or three of the 
following factors be used to set available points: number
of submitted logs, number of contacts reported in those
logs, number of hours that the contest runs.  Thus, the
points available reflect the "importance" of each 
contest in some crude way.  They change from year to
year as contest sponsors vie to attract activity - good
competition for them, too.

Divide the available points among the high scorers in each
geographic region.  Although the suggestion to use grid
locators is intriguing, most people in the world feel a
stronger sense of comraderie (or antipathy!) for their
neighbors and co-nationals.  So I would suggest that each
country be a region and that "large" countries be subdivided
in some reasonable way.  Not sure whether square miles or
number of hams is most reasonable.  But set up regions so
that there is a statistically significant number of entries
from most of them.  Sure, a small, emerging nation may 
result in zero or one entrant.  But it will only receive
a small number of points, too.  Consider reserving some
of the points for continental scores in WW tests or call
areas in national tests.   

Allocate the available points within a region using a "sum
of the digits" algorithm with the number of places proportional
to the number of entrants in the last running.  Max 10 point
winners in a region.  So Germany might allocate 10 places
to its active population.  The sum of 10 thru 1 is