On 27/08/13 13:32, Lodewijk wrote:
preselection actually doesn't happen in all countries, so I feel I have to break this chorus :)
In the Netherlands we have always had a system where every jury member had to see every image submitted (...)
In Spain we also had every jury member review all the images. WLM-ES worked with a jury of five members. Each member of the jury reviewed the 39460 participating photos and chose the 25 they deemed to be the best.
Joining the results of each of them, we made a pool of 117 photos (they could be up to 125, but there were photos selected by several members). The juries did not know what photos were each selected by each of the other ones.
Then in round 2 they gave points from 0 to 10 to each of them on artistic, technical and encyclopedic categories. This was done through an application which shuffled the images, to avoid a bias in the order of presentation. They were also unaware of what had voted each of them. We then sorted them by the number of points. Additionally, 15 of them turned out to be ineligible at this step.
Finally, they met in irc to straighten a few ties which appeared on the top-10 of that ordered list.
Whatever method or setup you choose, I advise a few things:
- make sure that you have your 10 nominations for the international
round submitted well in time! The deadline is 31 October (UTC), and this deadline is NOT FLEXIBLE! Keep some space before that date, to be able to manage sickness or hit-by-bus-situations. After this deadline, the nominations will be closed, and the international jury starts their work. We will send more specific instructions about this when that time approaches.
Prepare for an earlier delivery date: There may be silly delays discussing how the voting should be done (which would ideally have been fixed in Sep), you may need to create a zip with all photos, the server may break serving the file, there may be errors opening the files...
- Appoint a non-voting jury moderator that will manage the process and
poke people. This can be a staff member in your case.
+1 It's important to have someone in charge of poking the jury. Some members won't need it, but one guy can delay the whole process.
- Set up a temporary mailing list, where each juror and the jury
moderator is subscribed to. 4) describe the jury process publicly, and describe your deliberations (including reasons why the top-10/20/30 was selected) in a jury report. 5) Finally, make sure that your 10 nominations are submitted before the deadline. (Yes, this is mentioned twice, because it would be a pity if after all the work, your photos are not considered for the international round!)
Don't miss the deadline. If your nominations aren't available at that date, your photos won't enter the international round. This will also make your country participations not count for the Guinness Record. **This happened last year** (with sadness from all sides)
Finally, if your country is having difficulties with the process, *speak up*. It may be possible for other organisers to get you some extra juries or technical help. But we won't be able to help you if we didn't know that you needed it!
God save all our brave juries!