For the committee
For the people deciding whether the club uses this: the secretary, the treasurer, whoever asks the awkward questions. Written to be read at a meeting.
Everything here is a statement about how the software behaves and can be checked in the code. Nothing here is legal advice.
What it is for
Clubs argue about best-and-fairest awards every single year, and the argument is almost always one of four:
- Somebody saw the count early.
- The votes were counted wrong.
- The rules changed after people had voted.
- Nobody can remember what the rules were.
This app is built around those four. The count is sealed and every look at it leaves a record. The count is arithmetic done in one place and shown in full. The scoring cannot be changed once anybody has voted. And every published award gets a public page stating the rules it was run under.
Who can see what
| Sees whether you voted | Sees the running count | Sees your ballot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Another voter | no | no | no |
| The award's administrator | yes | no | no |
| Someone granted tally access | yes | yes | no |
| The public | no | no | no |
Administering the award and seeing the count are separate permissions. This is the single most important line in this document. A club can have the team manager running the fixtures and the roster with no ability to look at the count at all, and the president able to look with no ability to change anything.
Nobody sees an individual ballot. No screen in the app puts a name against a ballot. The club can see that you voted; not what you voted. A ballot cast with an issued code has no account behind it at all.
Every look at the count is recorded, by the database, in the same operation that reads the votes — so the votes cannot be read without leaving a mark. The award's administrators can read that log: who looked, and when.
One honest caveat: publishing a result reveals how the votes fell, which is what a result is. On a two-person panel, unanimity is visible from the aggregate. That is a property of announcing a winner, not a leak — but it is worth knowing before a very small panel votes.
What the club is asked for
From the people who run the award and vote: an email address, and — if they sign in with a provider — whatever that provider tells the app, which is an identifier and an email address. There are no passwords anywhere in this system. Either the app asks Google or Microsoft whether the person is who they say they are, or it emails a short code to the address and asks them to type it back. Neither route creates a password for your committee to look after, and neither creates one for a volunteer to reuse from somewhere else.
From players: a name, and a squad number if you have one. That is all. There is deliberately no photograph feature — the club considered it and declined to build one, because storing photographs of players, some of them children, is a permanent obligation and a moderation problem that a volunteer committee should not be handed.
From people who vote with a code: nothing at all. No account, no email address, no name.
Junior teams
Read this bit properly.
A public page names players. That is the point of it for a senior team and a problem for a junior one.
- Publishing is off by default and is a deliberate act, per award.
- A club running junior teams should think hard before publishing those awards, and the same goes for the winner card, which names the winner.
- The app's link previews — what shows up when somebody pastes a link into WhatsApp or Facebook — never name a player, including the winner. That is deliberate, because a preview travels with every paste, is cached by chat apps and turns up on the lock screens of people who were never sent anything.
The app will not stop you publishing a junior award. It is your decision and your safeguarding policy.
Removing somebody
A player who has left is made inactive: off future ballots, votes intact.
A player who must be removed entirely — a safeguarding matter, or a request from the person — can be erased from the roster. The name and squad number are blanked permanently. The votes cast for them survive as numbers with no name attached, because a count that dropped them would restate a season the club has already announced.
A whole season can be deleted, and it takes everything in it. The administrator has to type the award's name back to confirm, and the check is in the database rather than only in the form.
If the club stops using the app, deleting each award removes the club's data from it.
What it costs, and who runs it
Nothing. This service is provided free of charge by Michael Josem.
He tries to act in good faith, but he is doing this for free and makes no representations or guarantees about service provision. There is no uptime commitment, no support agreement and no promise that it will still be here next season. Read that as it is written, and keep your own record of a result that matters to your club — the printable count and the CSV export are both there for exactly that.
If your club needs a higher level of service provision than that, email Michael to discuss it.
What it does not do
Worth stating so nobody discovers it in July.
- It is one award, one team, one season. A club with five teams runs five awards. There is no single "our club" account yet, so five awards means five separate panels invited separately.
- It does not post to social media. It makes an image; a person posts it.
- It does not track anybody. No analytics on the public pages, no cookies beyond what signing in requires.
- It does not have a mobile app. It is a website, which is why nobody has to install anything to vote.
- It cannot tell you who is winning mid-season. That is not a missing feature.
The awkward questions, answered
"Could an administrator look at the count and say nothing?" They would have to be given tally access first, which is a separate grant somebody made deliberately. And the look would be in the audit log, which the other administrators can read. So: they could look, and they could not look unnoticed.
"Could somebody change the scoring after seeing the votes?" No. The scoring is frozen by the database the moment the first ballot exists.
"Could somebody vote twice?" A panel member has one ballot per round; resubmitting replaces it. A code is spent when it is used. A paper slip is numbered and its number is only redeemable by an administrator typing it up, so a slip cannot be used twice or used online.
"What if a vote genuinely needs to be removed?" It can be set aside with a reason. It stops counting, it is never deleted, and both the act and the reason are in the audit log.
"What if we disagree with the result?" Every published award has a page stating the format, who voted, the minimum-games rule if the club has one, and the tie-break rule — all of it set before the season started. It is linked from the club's page and carried on the winner card as a QR code. Point at it.
"Who else can see our club's page?" Anybody with the address. It is a public web page. It is not listed in a directory, and there is no directory.