ORlimpics: Making an OR medal list from OR-Exchange scores and badges

After reading Michael Trick’s blog post on ways of scoring countries according to the medal list, I wondered how to come up with a similar list in the OR world. After all, we have OR-Exchange, an online community where users are scored for their questions and answers as well as recognized with badges for certain achievements (gold, silver and bronze badges: quite similar to the Olympic Games). The results that I found provide an interesting picture of the community. In fact, I was glad that Brazil was better ranked in this list than in the one of the 2012 Summer Games!

I decided to summarize the results of all participants with a score of at least 200 (at first, I wanted to consider at least 100, but there were too many people without a declared country in the range 100-200, so I kept a smaller but reliable sample). I counted each badge as a medal, and I also considered two extra sets of medals to valorize the score of the participants.

The first set is equivalent to the marathon: who are the most diligent contributors? Gold for Paul Rubin, silver for DC Woods, and bronze for Bo Jensen. The second set accounted for team work: which countries had the higher combined score? Gold for the USA (Rubin alone guaranteed that), silver for Germany (mostly due to Florian Bahr and Marco Lüebbecke), and bronze for Denmark (Bo Jensen again).

After counting those, the final ranking was the following:

Kudos to the OR-Exchange maintainers

Finally, even if not considered in the medal list ranking, we must account for something similar to the Pierre de Coubertin medals, which are offered to athletes who represented the truly Olympic spirit. In the context of OR-Exchange, the first thing that comes to my mind is the effort of some individuals and of INFORMS as well to keep OR-Exchange up and running properly. Among the top scores in the website, I know for sure that I can count Michael Trick, Mary Leszczynski, and Herman Strom as medalists for their effort on that. There are probably other “OR athletes” who deserve this medal, so I will consider this list as open-ended and I would appreciate any comment to include other contributors in the list.