About Rezon.io

Why Rezon exists

Rezon grew out of repeated judging problems at live and online competitions. Our founder, Oleg Knyaginin, has worked in international competition judging since 2013, with roughly 300 live events and many online events behind him. We needed a way to turn individual judgments into a collective result that we could explain when participants questioned it.

From votes and scores to ranking

In online events, we first tried single-choice voting, then multiple-choice voting. A single choice told us only someone’s first preference; multiple choices showed broader support without its order. For the decisions we needed to make, both gave us substantially less useful information than ranking.
Live events started with scoring. One judge might use the full 0–10 scale while another stays between 4 and 7. If raw scores are simply added or averaged, their maximum gaps between candidates are 10 and 3 points: the first judge can have about 3.3 times as much influence on a comparison, despite nominally equal votes. Ranking focused the task on relative preference between alternatives.
Each change answered a practical problem. We wanted more information from each ballot and less dependence on one participant having the strongest organised first-choice support group.

Paper cards and Excel

By 2014, ranked judging with paper cards was in regular use. Judges arranged candidates in order of preference; we entered their rankings into Excel and calculated the result. This gave us a concrete process to repeat, inspect and improve from one event to the next.
Audience voting also took different forms. In one competition, we counted likes for People’s Choice. When we wanted to find out which flavours the audience liked most, we asked people to rank their favourites.

From internal process to Rezon.io

The paper-and-Excel workflow became an internal software tool. Rezon.io was created in 2022 around that process.
We started with a Russian patent in Oleg’s name, as he holds a Russian passport (RU 2863601 C1). It covers parts of our approach, specifically the interaction used to arrange cards into a ranking. We are now in the process of filing an international application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
For several years, Rezon remained mainly an internal competition tool. We opened it to wider public use in summer 2026.

What we learned

Asking people to rank the options gave us richer input. The next problem was how to combine many individual rankings into one collective result.
Rezon can aggregate relative preferences using established methods such as Schulze (Beatpath), with configurable methods and predefined tie-resolution cascades. The result follows explicit rules instead of relying on an average of arbitrary scores or an improvised response to a tie.
The aim is a fuller picture of preferences, fewer disputes around apparently arbitrary outcomes, and a final result that is easier to explain and defend. Bias and tactical voting remain possible. Clear aggregation and tie-resolution rules make the calculation reproducible; they do not guarantee a fair outcome.

Rezon today

Rezon is a ranked-choice and ranked-feedback platform for collective decisions that need an explainable result. The purpose is to get more useful decision information from the same group of people, rather than simply asking more questions.
Competition and jury judging remain central. The same approach also supports product and roadmap prioritisation, customer and audience preference research, community and team decisions, finalist selection, and People’s Choice voting where ranked preferences fit the task.
Rich option cards bring images, video, descriptions, attachments and links into the comparison. Private notes and temporary personal ratings help people remember their assessments; the ballot records their ranking. Partial rankings and equal rankings are available where appropriate. Controlled or public participation, multilingual workflows, configurable counting rules and results that can be reviewed and exported carry the original judging process into wider use.

European development and infrastructure

Rezon.io is developed in Europe and hosted on servers in Germany. Privacy and GDPR requirements inform workflows for organisations that need controlled and explainable decision processes, including how participation is organised and access is managed.