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

Second MeiLin's offer

[karen-wehrstein.livejournal.com]

...and Ysabet's point re conflict of interest. If you want to get something done, ask someone busy, and that means hitting up the people in the field who are active. While we're this small, there's no way around it.

My site at www.chevenga.com is another fine example of MeiLin's work (not that I didn't have a lot of input). These sites are easy to navigate, easy to follow multiple conversations on, easy to post on, easy to spot the newest content on, clean and attractive. There is another not-so-obvious benefit in a Drupal site (that being the content management system MeiLin uses): there are a bunch of us, many of us quite busy people, who are very familiar with it, know how to use it and, once it gets going, will tweet the heck out of it. (A Facebook page someone would have to take charge of, but Twitter, I'm sure, will mostly take care of itself). As I've mentioned elsewhere, there have been discussions over at weblit.us, which is a writer-oriented site, about a reader-oriented site, which could easily be expanded into a site for all forms of crowdfunded work, though I think prose writing would dominate as it did in the awards. All that is needed to tap into that talent and enthusiasm is a site. I for one would be interested in helping plan/run it.

Re subdividing the award categories, for the "non-realistic fiction" division I suggest the term "fantastical fiction" as it covers both sf and fantasy. I also suggest opening it up to completed works which are still available online whenever they were completed, with the codicil that if a work has won, it is not eligible again. In fact if you make that a rule, you have an obvious source of judges for a juried award: previous winners who are continuing their winning works and therefore don't have eligible pieces in the category they're judging. (Though how this could be made to work for the categories with repeated short works, I'm not sure.)

Re the voting method, at the risk of sounding like I'm piling on, I think it's absolutely mandatory that it be changed. There are software methods to guarantee secret voting while simultaneously preventing repeat voting or other cheating. I know that I personally lost legitimate votes due to readers being unwilling to sign up to a LJ account or post their full names on the Internet, and I saw it with other works also. Shirley and I were at a particular disadvantage because we have many readers who like both our works but don't want to vote for one of us identifiably for fear of offending the other. Everyone who doesn't have a LiveJournal following was at an automatic disadvantage. I had one reader who was willing to vote but had to ask me for instructions and even so had a hard time--who knows how many others gave up and didn't bother. I didn't stop asking, but I was embarrassed to. To make voted awards a success we have to encourage rather than discourage voting, and that means making it easy and anonymous.

I think anonymous nomination, however, should be impossible, since even being nominated is an honour and a distinction (I plan to keep my nominee badge visible) and I suspect a person or two nominated themselves.

Having said all that, I think the first R&Bs were a resounding success. I congratulate and thank Ysabet for getting the ball rolling, as well as everyone else who contributed in some way, and anticipate a great future for the awards.

Re: Second MeiLin's offer

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>There is another not-so-obvious benefit in a Drupal site (that being the content management system MeiLin uses): there are a bunch of us, many of us quite busy people, who are very familiar with it, know how to use it <<

That was actually one of my leading points: we need a code system that is popular, so more than one person can handle it if necessary.

>> once it gets going, will tweet the heck out of it.<<

That would be very helpful. So would a hashtag, maybe #crowdfundinghub or the like.

>>A Facebook page someone would have to take charge of<<

I checked that. A FB page requires an "official representative" of an organization to start it. A FB group can be started by anyone. I think this is a conversation of its own, which to have and what for.

>> In fact if you make that a rule, you have an obvious source of judges for a juried award: <<

Discussion for a judged award is here:
http://community.livejournal.com/crowdfunding/175923.html

>>Re the voting method, at the risk of sounding like I'm piling on, I think it's absolutely mandatory that it be changed.<<

MeiLin says Drupal comes with a polling feature. If the crowdfunding hub site manifests, then we can take a look at how its polling feature works, hopefully an improvement over the LJ polling feature.

>>To make voted awards a success we have to encourage rather than discourage voting, and that means making it easy and anonymous.<<

Easy, yes. Completely anonymous, no, because then there would be no way to keep people from voting multiple times. We could make the voter identity visible only to people managing the awards, though.

>>I think anonymous nomination, however, should be impossible, since even being nominated is an honour and a distinction (I plan to keep my nominee badge visible) and I suspect a person or two nominated themselves.<<

I agree. We need to know where the nominations are coming from. Yes, we had a very few people nominate themselves; we disqualified those nominations and reminded people that you can't nominate or vote for yourself in the R&B.

I hope that all the nominees will keep their badges! It shows that somebody really likes your stuff.

>>I think the first R&Bs were a resounding success. <<

I'm pleased too. I expected to have room for growth. I'm really enthused by how much happened just this first year!

>>I congratulate and thank Ysabet for getting the ball rolling, as well as everyone else who contributed in some way, and anticipate a great future for the awards.<<

*bow, flourish* Thank you. I had a lot of great help from people, and we should have more folks for future tasks now that we have a more detailed idea of what we need.