Weeding at Your Country Your Call

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The Irish Presidential initiative called “Your Country Your Call” produced a whopping total of 10,114 entries to the “competition” designed to elicit ideas that could stimulate the country and create jobs.

A quick scroll through the proposals immediately shows that only a small percentage have any real substance. As one commentator put it, “many entries look like they were written on the back of a beer mat”, to which I would add, very late in the evening and after a skin full of beer.

My rough estimate is that perhaps 5% of the proposals offer ideas of any depth. At 5% useful ideas it would still leave about 500 suggestions with some reasonable degree of practicality.

The judges will have a tough job sorting through the list. As far as I can gather there are six judges on the panel along with a chairman, each one will have to scan and evaluate 1,444 entries apiece.

Putting it another way, if you take the 10,114 entries and spend just 30 seconds considering each one on a first scan, it will amount to 84 man-hours.

Now I guess that the beer mat inscribed rubbish will be fairly quickly eliminated from the pile leaving maybe 500 entries to be more seriously considered. Lets assume there are moderate sized attachment with each of these entries, and lets say each takes an average of 20 minutes to digest the attachment, that’s 166 man hours for that stage.

We now have a total of some 250 man-hours. If we allow a generous 5 hours of this work per day, that would give us some 50 man-days in total. These guys are going to be busy unless they have some helpers to at least weed out the rubbish for them.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the "Competition".

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