Rose and Bay Awards Followup Report

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

The 2010 Rose and Bay Awards for excellence in cyberfunded creativity have now concluded.  Winners have been announced for Art, Fiction, Other Project and Poetry, Patron.  We are currently working on the blog badges for the winners, and have plans for physical manifestations of the awards. 

Special Thanks To...
These folks helped make the Rose and Bay Awards a success.  Please give them a round of applause!

jenny_evergreen for proposing the Patron category and the hardcopy certificates
siege for proposing the name "Rose and Bay"
haikujaguar for offering the black-and-white "Rose and Bay" logo
xjenavivex for handling the Poetry and Patron categories, and some other support stuff
valdary for offering several different versions of a full-color LJ icon
zyngasvryka for connecting with Dave Kirby of Ace Awards, and other promotional ideas
karen_wehrstein for connecting with Dave Kirby of Ace Awards, colorizing the black-and-white logo, and making the award badges
Dave Kirby of Ace Awards for offering to create and donate plaques for the category winners ... ooo, shiny!

Also, thanks to all the folks who made nominations, to the nominees whose projects appeared in our polls, and to the voters.  Participation has been enthusiastic all around.  Given that Fiction and Other Project both had well over a hundred votes, and the other categories also had substantial numbers, we probably had several hundred participants even allowing for some overlap from people voting in multiple categories.


What Next?

We plan to run the Rose and Bay Awards in years to come.  Some suggestions were made that we weren't able to implement this year, so we have room to grow.  These include...

• Move the Rose and Bay Awards off LiveJournal to increase accessibility.  (This would require having a crowdfunding hub site and/or a separate award website.  It seems very useful, if such can be manifested.)
• Split off "Webcomics" as a separate category from "Other Project."  (This is relatively easy to do, and would probably benefit both the webcomics and the miscellaneous projects.  All it needs is a volunteer to manage it.)
• Subdivide the "Fiction" category.  (Our biggest category, this is the only one whose poll had to be split across two questions.  Any ideas for good ways to break this into smaller categories?  Volunteers to manage them?)
• Assign a different manager for each category.  (Again, easy to go, given sufficient volunteers who are not eligible for the category they wish to handle.  I'll probably keep Art.)
• Offer cash and/or other prizes.  (This would certainly make the winners happy, and be good publicity for the sponsors.  With more time to work on this, and preferably a team of volunteers, we might manage to pull this together for next year.)
  

Do you have other ideas for improvements?  Comment below!


You can read more about the Rose and Bay Award on the landing page.

Comments

[ceciliatan.livejournal.com]

Huzzah! Huge thanks to everyone who made the awards a reality!

Some thoughts on the "what next" above:

Fiction was the largest category but splitting it up could be tricky. If you do it by genre you could end up with potentially ever-proliferating categories. One possibly easy split to contemplate... finished/static projects versus ones that are still ongoing? Maybe? Just a thought.

As for cash prizes, as a previous winner and in the 'crowdfunding' spirit, I'll gladly auction off a 'cameo' appearance in Daron's Guitar Chronicles (http://daron.ceciliatan.com) and donate the proceeds to the prize fund? Minimum bid $25?

As for moving off Livejournal, a dedicated site wouldn't be badd, but more than moving "off" LJ, it would be good to see Rose and Bay sprout branches on other social networking sites, like have a Facebook page, a twitter feed, etc. It's relatively easy, though, if you were to set up a dedicated word press site, to have plugins set up so every post to that site gets mirrored on Facebook, in this LJ comm, and tweeted. I'm not in a position to be able to volunteer to host such a thing, but someone out there must...?

Just some thoughts. I have no doubt next year's awards will be even more awesome!

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Fiction was the largest category but splitting it up could be tricky. If you do it by genre you could end up with potentially ever-proliferating categories.<<

I definitely want to avoid infinite subdivision.

>> One possibly easy split to contemplate... finished/static projects versus ones that are still ongoing? Maybe? Just a thought.<<

Okay, that has potential.

>> As for cash prizes, as a previous winner and in the 'crowdfunding' spirit, I'll gladly auction off a 'cameo' appearance <<

Thank you! I'll have to find a place to track volunteer/sponsor offers.

>> As for moving off Livejournal, a dedicated site wouldn't be badd, but more than moving "off" LJ, it would be good to see Rose and Bay sprout branches on other social networking sites, like have a Facebook page, a twitter feed, etc.<<

Okay, branching out to promote the award on multiple social networks would be good. We'd need a volunteer for that, or even one per network.

>> It's relatively easy, though, if you were to set up a dedicated word press site, to have plugins set up so every post to that site gets mirrored on Facebook, in this LJ comm, and tweeted. <<

Wordpress is a possibility. A recent discussion of a crowdfunding hub site included the idea of starting with Wordpress because it's easier than hand-coding a whole site from scratch. It wouldn't do everything we'd need, but would be a step in the right direction.

Re: Hmm...

[ceciliatan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've definitely found WordPress to be pretty handy. It takes some experimentation to get everything you want, and sometimes plugins are broken or cease being supported, but as they say, you get what you pay for, and since it's all free... On the other hand, lots of people use it and are usually willing to lend advice & help. So all my websites are using it now and I don't have to be a super-techy person myself to do most of what I want.

Re: Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>> sometimes plugins are broken or cease being supported, but as they say, you get what you pay for, and since it's all free...<<

Actually, not all of it is free. There are some paid themes and crowdfunded plug-ins that are very well supported, so that if you want to pay for extra-fine service and quality, you can do that.

One of the earlier discussions about WP for our crowdfunding needs touched on that: a "hub" blog that would echo posts from all the individual project blogs connected to it. Thesis, one of the paid themes, is ideal for that. (We'd also need to be using Wordpress MU, the multi-user version.)

[rowyn]

An alternative to "genre" would be length, or style. Eg, categories for Short Story vs Serial vs Flash Fiction. Or Interactive Fiction (where the audience can interact with the characters and/or influence the outcome of subsequent entries, as in sythyry or godkin, for example) vs Traditional.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I prefer this distinction to genre.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I'd rather not use genre to subdivide the category, unless that's really the only way to split up what we're getting.