Open Discussion

[paynesgrey]

I'm opening a discussion to the members to hear their opinions on what we need to do improve this community. Though we may not take everything into consideration, I want to hear your thoughts.

If you are willing to help out with this community in the future, please say so. Hopefully we can get things going again if people are still interested.

~ paynesgrey

Comments

This is a repeat post; sorry for the spam; but I'd figured I'd get my idea(s) out there. ^^

[scottishfae]

While I ended up very frustrated with the judging process, and I likewise probably frustrated a lot of my fellow judges in turn; it was definitely something that I would participate in again.

I agree with a lot of your points mentioned above and, when I have more time, I'll delve into contemplation of those further. However, the thing that really got me this past round was the communication between judges. I'm as guilty as the rest of my fellow judges, but there was really no communication until the deadlines grew so close that procrastination was no longer an option. This makes the process even more aggravating because everyone is stressed trying to hit deadline and yet still manage their RL. This is probably one of the biggest issues I saw this past Feb/March, and probably one of the biggest things to overcome.

In one of my classes we're discussing how to incorporate new technology as communications for the classroom; I'm going to explore some of that more and see if I can't find a way to apply that to this community.

I was also wondering if it would be to complicated to maybe switch off categories during the process of judging. For example, say ella, fae, and scott have the WIP category to begin with. They go through the judging criteria for the first selection (getting rid of the things that are grammatically and conceptually unfit*) and they choose the ones that should go on to the next round. Then, the WIP category gets passed to another group of judges: aoife, seamus, and haru who then go through the category and actually choose the ultimate "winners" of that category. I don't know if this is viable, but it seemed to me that, once through the 1st round of judging, most judges already had their mindset on their favorites and thus, by sending off the qualifiers of the 1st round to another group of judges, you get a fresh look at the same category without personal bias coming into play (which isn't supposed to be there, I'm aware, but it is all the same.)

*I'd also like to see the procedures of the first round to be reiterated to the judges. Unless I've already come to mistake things, the 1st found was about eliminating things that did not fit the quality standards of the Shikon Awards. Things that had poor characterization, bad grammar, improper spelling, and etc were to be weeded out at the beginning. The first round was not, if I remember correctly, supposed to be about favorites. That part comes later, in the 2nd round. So to me, this first round was almost completely pointless as it was just treated as a preliminary 2nd round. I hope that makes sense. I'm not saying that the 1st round should be taken out, I just think we need to make a point to let judges know why the first round exists.