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!

[dreamwriteremmy]

I've mentioned in my journal and here that originally I was planning to work on a hub-site database and sample library for this semester, but it has since fallen through due to several major underestimations that make it a bit too difficult for it to be a short-term project.

In spite of that, I would be willing to pick up the project and make it when I have a bit more available time and have moved my website to its new home by the end of the semester. Likely everyone should hear back from me by mid-to-late May with a consulting questionnaire both on the part of creators and patrons.

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

It was very well organized and fun to watch.

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.

[zeeth_kyrah]

As far as dividing Fiction, the usual genre split of "Fantastical" vs "Realistic" makes sense to me, but that depends on the mix of nominees and their qualifying works. Some people write/create a broad spectrum of things, and thus could be eligible for multiple sub-categories.

Of course, I don't see this as a really big problem right now, since it's good to know what a creator produces; not everyone in the crowd will like all kinds of stuff, but they might like some of what that person produces and seek more works by that person even if the content isn't their usual fare. :)

[meilin-miranda.livejournal.com]

Two things I'd like to see:

1) I'd like to see the Rose & Bays be juried rather than be voting at large. As things stand, it's a popularity contest. Note that this is not sour grapes on my part; coming in second to Cecilia Tan is no shame. Nevertheless, the award would mean more were it juried in some fashion.

2) It needs its own website. I agree with Cecilia that the R&Bs need to reach out via Facebook/Twitter/etc too. I would offer to host it (and could provide those capabilities) but I'm sure some might consider it a conflict of interest.

[jenny_evergreen]

Thank you for the thank you! :) I'm glad to be involved.

I think splitting off webcomics might as well be considered done; there's just no reason not to.

I agree that the voting needs to change from an LJ poll, which has a variety of limitations. I may make researching other voting methods a project for myself, but I'm not promising!
I do agree that we should keep Rose & Bay as a popular award rather than a juried one.

I think, assuming the award is going to continue to grow, fiction is ultimately going to end up subdivided by genre; I think sticking with your basic bookstore division is doable; Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mystery, and General would be an easy place to start. Sci-Fi & Fantasy might be a bit top heavy right now, but I think that's okay and that other genres will catch up eventually.

I may consider being responsible for a category next year; I'd take art, but since you want to keep that, maybe Webcomics? I hesitate because I don't know whether it would better if the person responsible for a category was involved in it or not; I read only a few webcomics and am actively limiting my reading because I simply don't have time. Do we want the people running categories to be well-versed in the field or ignorant of it? Or doesn't it matter?
I definitely couldn't do Patron or Other Project, as I AM a patron and I will be eligible for Other Project in the next couple of years. I hesitate to commit to Fiction or Poetry just in case I lose my mind and start writing again. :P

I think we need to be careful that the patron category, in particular, not be affected by fund raising for cash prizes, maybe keeping cash donations anonymous or something. Not that anyone involved currently would be unscrupulous, but with an eye to the long term...

[ellenmillion.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about other categories and found a few awards I'd like to see, but they are category independent, like favorite webpage, a favorite single piece or favorite character (any of which could be from fiction, webcomics, artwork, other etc.). Is there a way to add those?