The Rhizome.org 2004 Net Art Commissions will award five new net art projects with commissions ranging from $1,500 to $3,500. We are interested in having a relatively open decision-making process that gives community members a substantial say in these awards while also retaining a traditional voting role for the Commissions jury.

Please note that we reserve the right to change the process below at any point, if we feel changes are necessary to ensure the privacy, fairness, and feasibility of the process.

To be eligible to vote in the Commissions process, you need to be a Rhizome member in good standing. In addition, to prevent people from signing up at the last minute solely for the purpose of influencing the result, only Rhizome members with accounts that were created before December 1, 2003 may vote.

Each Rhizome member should only vote once, regardless of how many valid memberships that person may have. We reserve the right to eliminate any votes if we believe that they come from a member who is voting with more than one membership.

Rhizome's first Commissioning Program, the 2002 cycle, received more than 100 entries. We expect this Commissioning Program to receive at least the same number of entries.

Rhizome community members will choose finalists from this initial pool. They will be asked to vote Yes or No for any and all proposals, and will be able to change their votes at any time in the initial stage. Although members will be able to vote on any proposal at any time, they will also be given an interface that encourages them to review proposals with the least number of votes, so that all proposals will receive roughly the same number of votes.

Under this system, no member will be required to review all the proposals. However, the more proposals you vote for, the more influence you will have over which proposals proceed to the final stage.

At the end of the first stage, each proposal will be ranked according to the percentage of Yes votes it receives. For example, a proposal which receives 10 Yes votes will be ranked at 100%, and a proposal that receives 15 Yes votes and 5 No votes will be ranked at 75%. The highest ranking 25 proposals will move on to the final stage; this may be more than 25 in the case of ties.

The initial stage will last from March 7 to March 21, 2004.

In the final stage, both Rhizome members and the jury will choose awardees based on the pool of 25 or more finalists. Rhizome members will choose one of the five awards; the jury will choose the remaining four.

The final stage will last from March 22 to April 5, 2004.

Final stage: Rhizome members

From the 25 or more finalists, Rhizome members will be able to choose one of the five awards. The voting system used for the final stage will be Single Transferable Vote, also known as Instant Runoff Voting. Each voter will rank the proposals from most favorite to least favorite. When the votes are tallied, the first-place votes are counted to see if any proposal has received more than 50% of the votes. If so, then that proposal is the winner. Otherwise, the proposal with the least first-place votes is removed from the list of proposals, and the process is repeated.

For example: Five voters have to choose one winning proposal among four candidates: a, b, c, and d. They vote as follows:

In the first round, a gets 2 votes, b gets 2, and c gets 1. Nobody has the majority (3), so we remove the least popular candidate, c, making Hans' vote effectively "ab". Now a gets 3 votes and b gets 2 votes, and a is the winner.

Voters are not required to rank all final proposals, but they are encouraged to rank as many as possible. If you rank only a few candidates, it's possible that your vote will end up being eliminated entirely in the final tally.

In the event that the jury feels that the members' first-place choice will require a disproportionately large amount of the commission funds, we reserve the right to substitute a choice further down the members' list.

The jury consists of German critic Tilman Baumgartel, artist Natalie Bookchin of CalArts, Rachel Greene of Rhizome.org, Francis Hwang of Rhizome.org, and Japanese curator Yukiko Shikata. This jury will be responsible for choosing four of the five awards.

The jury will decide on four awards, with one more on deck in case there is overlap with the Rhizome members' choice. The process for this will be much less formal. Maybe it will involve monkeys.

At all phases of the process, we encourage and expect open discussion of the proposals, both on Rhizome and elsewhere online. We hope that this discussion will be respectful and considerate of all the artists involved.