Rose and Bay Awards Followup Report
Mar. 4th, 2010 08:23 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
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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!
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.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!
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-05 04:01 am (UTC)I would very much like to see another voting/judging method. I have never been a supporter of popular vote methods - they often just tell you who already HAS the fans, not the quality of the entries - and I was really appalled to see not only public results, but public results that tell who voted and for what. I actually stopped voting once I realized the results were public, and stopped asking for votes at that time, too.
I would like to see nominations lead to selection by a team of judges, personally.
Fiction could be broken into serials versus short fiction, maybe?
I'd be happy to donate a few prizes, and I can also provide hosting space, if we decide to go off-LJ.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-05 04:09 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2010-03-05 06:41 pm (UTC)However, I understand that not everyone is comfortable about this. I'm open to using a different voting tool next year. With luck we might have a crowdfunding hub site by then, and ideally that would be equipped with its own poll feature.
There is now a separate post for the discussion of a judged award, so anyone interested in that is encouraged to dig in.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2010-03-22 02:26 am (UTC)It also means that the nominees don't really dispute the results and the awards can't be accused of being "fixed" for the friends of the organizers, etc. if all the votes are visible. That kind of drama has damaged other awards where the results weren't transparent.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2010-03-23 10:26 pm (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2010-03-05 07:33 am (UTC)Popular vote is an easy place to start. I wanted something that 1) I could launch myself, and 2) would allow everyone to participate. I feel it's important at this stage of the crowdfunding movement to encourage people to get involved.
Depending on how the development of a hub site goes, if it goes, we may have other options for a voting method next year.
>> I would like to see nominations lead to selection by a team of judges, personally. <<
That would be a different kind of award. There are several variations in action, using nominations or judges hunting for stuff or a combination. To make this work, you need a handful of good judges who are experienced with the material, have time to read vast amounts of stuff, and won't degenerate into a screaming ball of hate during deliberations. It can be done, but it is not easy.
There is room in the crowdfunding field for more than one kind of award. Different awards meet different needs. Several folks raised the idea of judges, so if somebody wants to go this route, there is probably enough interest. I don't want to switch the Rose and Bay Awards to this model, though, because some people dislike judged awards. (There are pros and cons to every award model.)
>>Fiction could be broken into serials versus short fiction, maybe?<<
Ah, that's another good idea. We have two strong possibilities for fiction splits now, plus the "genre" option.
>>I'd be happy to donate a few prizes, and I can also provide hosting space, if we decide to go off-LJ.<<
Cool, thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-05 06:13 pm (UTC)The most important advantage to 'popular vote' is that it's easy, both for the participants and for the moderators. So it encourages people to come vote and look at the awards, and almost any other method would be more troublesome for the people tallying the results (which is already a time-consuming task, I expect). So I understand why the organizers want to stick with it.
But still: it does little to promote interest in the other nominees, and it rewards existing fanbase without commenting on the quality of unknown works.
I'm wondering if there's a way to preserve the 'anyone can participate' aspect without keeping the 'popular vote' aspect. Tossing an idea out: instead of a straight-up vote, have voters judge the nominees on a numerical scale, on several different qualities. (Qualities depending on category -- eg, for fiction: Plot, Style, Creativity, whatever). Each voter has to complete the ballot for each nominated work (or a significant fraction thereof), and each voter has to attest that they have reviewed the work.
This makes a lot more work for the voters, so you'd wind up with many fewer of them. But most of them (except those lying about it) would be ones who'd looked at all the nominees, which would be a benefit, and it would encourage voters to judge on quality rather than checking the box for whomever had pointed them in the direction of the voting page.
There might be a better way of handling it, and you'd want some spiffy back-end coding to make tallying results easy. But it is something worth considering, at least.
Thoughts
Date: 2010-03-05 06:45 pm (UTC)We already lost people this year because they said they didn't have time to read all the nominees and thus didn't feel it was fair to vote. I've seen other awards crash and burn when people were expected to read all the entries. I want to increase participation, not decrease it.
You might want to check out the new thread regarding a judged award.