More than 270 nominations, 21 judges, 1 runaway winner... Ben Macintyre reflects on our People of the Decade poll and what it reveals about the concerns and obsessions of our age, while Alan Franks and other members of the voting panel profile a formidable who’s who

We were asked to choose the people of the decade. Not the best people, mind. But the most important, influential and interesting people. Some of those who scored highly were role models, men and women of high virtue and accomplishment. Some were stinkers. A few were actually criminals and mass murderers.

The surprising thing about the winner, Barack Obama, is not that so many of us voted for him, but that one didn’t. (I have my suspicions: Caitlin, you are a subversive.)

It is also a measure of the speed of news, and the length of our attention spans, that a man overwhelmingly voted the most important person at the end of the decade was unknown to almost all of us at the start of it.

This was the decade when internet technology came to define our world: the entrepreneurs behind Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon all appear in the Top 25, but only one writer, one chef and two sportsmen. We rate our technology gurus, broadly speaking, above our politicians.

Our definition of what is important is limitlessly wide: J.K. Rowling is just one place above Osama bin Laden, which may be the first time these two have ever sat together in the same sentence. The Queen, a household name if ever there were one, polls fewer votes than Banksy, who remains nameless.

Celebrity is another defining feature of the decade. Fame for achievement – sporting, scientific, artistic – but also fame for the sake of fame, people who, in the strange self-replicating science of 21st-century celebrity, are celebrated simply because they are well known: Katie Price, Jade Goody, arguably Damien Hirst and Amy Winehouse. Simon Cowell polls more votes than Tony Blair.

Our television culture, to judge by the list, seems firmly focused on the US: the makers of no less than four American television series – The Wire, The Sopranos, West Wing and Lost – were cited by at least one panellist as people of the decade. But in our actors we are more patriotic: Ricky Gervais received more votes than any other actor, while Helen Mirren was the highest-polling actress. Five sportsmen and women make it into the Top 50, two pop singers, and two television celebrities, but only one adult novelist (generously defined): Dan Brown.

Ours is a secular and scientific age. Richard Dawkins, the outspoken defender of evolutionary science against creationism, is in the Top 10 with J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins, the human genome pioneers. The only religious figure to receive any votes at all was Pope Benedict XVI, who scored two.

In sum, then, to judge from this unscientific but intensely argued poll of Times folk and contributors, the Noughties was a decade fascinated by the internet and reality television, in which sportsmen and politicians vied for our attention – and we watched a great deal of American TV. If our heroes reflected our interest in science and celebrity, our villains also echoed the preoccupations of the age: terrorism (Osama bin Laden) and crooked business (Bernie Madoff).

But perhaps most striking of all is the sheer number of people voted for overall, and the breadth of the definition of what could be considered important and interesting. Twenty-one judges were asked to select 50 people: they came up with 272 names.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this:

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