PCWC (People's Clue Writing Competition) was started by Guy Jacobson on 24 September 1992. Unlike ACC and CWC, submitted clues are made publicly available before the winner is selected. Readers of the newsgroup (except the moderator) then vote for their favourite clues. The winner sets the next word, but judging is always done by the people.
The original PCWC scoring scheme required voters to rank all the clues in order — 1st, 2nd, etc. down to last place (with ties allowed). This was used in all PCWCs up to and including PCWC 23.
Mark Brader felt that this sort of ranking was hard to do, and noted that it did not allow a voter to say "this clue is first by a large margin", or to abstain on a particular clue (such as his own).
He proposed and implemented a system where each voter gives numerical scores to clues. All the scores given by this voter are linearly scaled so that the highest becomes 100%, and the lowest, 0%. This gives equal voting power to each voter. The score for each entry is the mean of the scaled votes for that entry. It is not necessary for a voter to vote on every clue. This system has been used from PCWC 24 (results posted on 19 January 1994) onwards. Almost all moderators in the contest since then have chosen to use this system, though it does occasionally draw complaints.
There is a utility called Pickwick which scales the votes and produces the "results" posting. Pickwick can be downloaded from Bruce McKenzie's site.
There is more PCWC information at this site, but it was last updated in 1998.
Why not have a go at solving the PCWCs' winning clues? Here are the answers and other statistics.