Disposing of warden/sponsor severity agenda in pipeline

[trust1995]

Let's address the elephant in the room.

Sponsors are incentivized to downplay severities.

• Makes them look better in the final audit report
• When a segment of the pot unlocks per severity, it is a direct monetary incentive.

Obviously wardens are incentivized to inflate for higher rewards, somewhat mitigated by the "overinflation" invalidation hammer.

However the only view that actually matters is the Judge verdict, which is trusted to be impartial.

I believe there's a lot of wasted time, effort and stress in the discussion of severities before the Judge makes their initial verdict. It is best to only have intellectual discussion of issues, their impacts, likelihood, preconditions and so on, without involving the "self-judging" process of wardens and sponsors.

What happens currently is that both sides, especially newer wardens and sponsors which are not familiar with the nuances of C4 judging criteria, create pressure and expectations for a specific judging outcome. Point is, judging does not require subjective inputs from either side, only the plain facts of the submission in hand. The rest is noise.

The proposed changes to the current pipeline are:

• Merge H/M into a single category for submission.
• Remove "disagree-with-severity" opinionated label before judging.
• Make it explicitly against rules of conduct to discuss severities until PJQA.
• PJQA is a time for both wardens and sponsor to present additional evidence, case law and so on that supports a different verdict.

[IllIllI000]

I find the Medium/High tags and being able to view their changes as the discussion progresses, to be a valuable piece of information in learning what arguments to judges are convincing, without having to read through every single comment. If the judge changes the severity from what it was, they need to provide proof then and there. If there's no initial severity to change from, my belief is that they'll provide the minimal justification, leading to longer PJQA. My understanding is that there shouldn't be any discussions prior to PJQA anyway, so it's not clear to me how removing the labels prior to judging helps to prevent wasted time. I've seen some comments here and there in discord about an ongoing contest's judging, but I haven't been following closely. This org issue sounds like it's addressing a specific problem, but it's not clear from the post what the exact problem is/where time is being wasted - could you provide some more specifics about the problem being addressed (but not specifics of the contest)? Comments are supposed to be fact-based anyway, so just stating that something is Medium vs High without fact-based reasons already is the law of the land.

[PoeAudits]

This could create an issue with wardens inserting severity judgement in the PoCs themselves. I agree that H/M should be a single category, as its ultimately up to the judges to determine severity, and all it really does is add complexity to the process. Perhaps different rules should apply when the pot unlocks greater rewards with higher severity findings, as these two cases are very distinct.