If any of you have any questions about how the Year in Review works, please post them to this topic. And we'll promptly post the answer.

This may be a daft question, but do the nominees for Best Resource have to be resources that were added in the past year?

I would assume that all nominations must be for material and submissions that occured in the last year.

This would include introductions, resources, quotes, and all other materials.

I know that the nomination process is near half over and that I should have probably brought this up earlier, but there is still plenty of time I think. Ok, i was wondering if we could give suggestions for new Year in Review Awards? My suggestions include Best New Member (or however that could be worded as best new overall debater) and Best Topic Creator (consistently good threads that bring about good debate).

Just a suggestion, maybe save them for next year.

Those are great ideas leder.

I don't know if this has come up before but I'll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

Instead of each individual member having to go through all the categories and pick-and-choose, wouldn't it streamline the process AND encourage greater voter participation if there was an actual ballot of "Best of" nominees?

Perhaps a group of Moderators and Members could decide on the five best choices in the various "Best of" categories and allow for an alternative choice for members who wish to nominate a favorite topic or thread. The various individual categories could remain as they are at present.

The problem as it is now when so few members nominating it comes down to the few that do instead of the many who don't. The way most awards work is the nominees are chosen first and the membership votes from the choices presented.

Why can't that work here?

Essentially, this part of the process is coming up with the nominees. Just to review, for those who may not recall (it has been a long year) or who may be new to the forum, these were the original rules and so on for the whole award process:

QUOTE

In the Year in Review forum, you will notice that there are already quite a few topics that have been started. Each topic is a different award category.

NOTE: Members cannot start new topics in this forum.

Each member may nominate one and only one nominee for each award category.

Please nominate the best candidate for each category, whether it has already been nominated or not. Second, third, and other follow up nominations will help determine [up to] ten "finalists".

NOTE: Multiple nominations in the same category from the same member will be deleted.

Members are also discouraged from posting comments about other members' nominations, as this will lead to excessively long threads. These types of posts will be deleted.

Members are welcome to submit a short post detailing their reasons for their nomination, if they are so inclined.

On July 1, 2003, the nomination phase will end, and the nomination posts will be moved off the forum. The nominations will be evaluated, and polls will be built to contain the most nominated / best nominees.

Then, on July 4, 2003, the official voting will begin.

This will continue for three weeks, until July 25, 2003.

At that point, the polls will be moved off the forum to allow preparation for the official Year in Review, which will be released during the August 1, 2003 live chat.

The first post in each topic will outline the minimum information required for acceptance of a nomination. This will usually be a link to a specific topic, or a specific member name.

The dates, obviously, will have changed, but the nomination phase will still close at the end of June (which gives us two weeks as of this post to come up with nominees). About a week later, the official "ballots" will be posted.

In some cases, there will only be two or three nominees (for forums that have not been that active in the past year, for example) but in others, there are usually quite a few by the end of the nomination process. We feel it is best for the nominees to come from the membership so that the staff doesn't (even unconsciously) "play favorites" and to encourage participation by everyone. Many regulars (and most members of the staff) do end up making nominations in most of the categories, though often not until near the deadline. For example, I usually wait until the nominations open before starting to review all the threads from the previous year. Some people - like Victoria Silverwolf and yourself, it would appear, have done a bit of homework in advance (or have a far better memory than I have).

Anyway, at the end of June, all of the nominees will be assessed and a final list will be drawn up for each category and will be posted as a poll for the official voting - the actual ballot of "Best of" nominees. So far, coming up with enough nominees has not been a problem. Hopefully, it will be the same this year. Though, you are right, there are generally more people who vote in the final polls than participate in the nomination process.

Yep, for all topic/post/submissions, they have to be between submitted no earlier than one year prior to the end date for nominations. In simpler terms, between July 1, 2005 and July 1, 2006.


Those are good ideas. I'll talk them over with Jaim.


I see what you mean in that it is much easier to pick from a list than to build a list, which I would imagine is evidenced in our nominations to votes ratio (I didn't actually compute this, it just seems like common sense).

The problem with the staff coming up with a starter list, though, is that these awards really aren't for us beyond the fact that we're members here too. The awards for you guys to pick which members/topics/submissions you think best exemplify AD, and give them a bit of recognition. We obviously don't want to be in a position where we choose favorites or influence the results, in either members or topics. Just like we try to set our own politics aside when acting on behalf of the site (by not moderating in topics where we have participated, etc.), we don't want to let our own relationships with members to impact these awards.

Maybe we can come up with an incentive to get more nominations?

Mike