The Dragon Awards
So, there's been a bit of a kerfuffle about the Dragon Awards and I wanted to get my understanding down. The Dragon Awards were created by Dragoncon as their own award (as opposed to the Hugos, which are part of Worldcon). There's a couple of major problems
1) According to the process, nominations are garnered via SurveyMonkey, which is pretty easily gamed. Anyone can nominate, anyone can vote. There's no membership requirement, just an email. This strikes me as a major problem. It's really easy to generate email addresses and game both the nomination and voting process, especially if you own a domain.
2) Voting is "one email, one vote" The official rules state "No automatic, programmed, robotic or similar means of voting are permitted" but it's not actually difficult to go around that in such a way that it's not going to trip any flags. It's trivial to generate emails of the form firstname.lastname@somerandomdomain.com if you own somerandomdomain.com.
2) They don't actually notify the nominees. If you're nominated for an award you won't know about it unless someone tells you. Neither N.K. Jemisin nor John Scalzi knew they were nominated.
3) Don't don't honor requests to be dropped from the ballot. This has happened to at least 2 people. That's...wrong. You should always have the choice to accept or decline a nomination. Dragoncon's official reply to one of the authors was...clueless. (Littlewood is still on the ballot as I write this. So is Scalzi).
I mean, I think that people who don't like how the Hugos are run are free to create their own award with their own rules. More power to 'em! But these awards aren't going to be particularly meaningful or prestigious unless they address these problems. It'll still be no more prestigious than any other internet poll, but it'll be a little less open to people trying to game the system.
ETA: Dragoncon has reconsidered.
DW comments
This entry was originally posted on my Dreamwidth journal. Please comment there as I am no longer reading comments here.