over the past years, we have had various requests to encourage national organizers to be transparent in their judging processes and who sits on their jury. Most of the national organizers are currently transparent about this already. In the past weeks/month, more conversation around this has continued with some concerns (valid or not) on certain jury processes. 

In this light, the international team intends to institute a new expectation for national organizers, namely to publish the members of their jury (be it their username or real life name) at some point. We have not figured out the practical details yet, but I can imagine that while we encourage publication on the website, we would ask national organizers to add a list of jury members to their submission to the international jury - which we then will publish as well. 

We also intend to publish by default the settings of the montage jury tool, and the number of photos in each round that the national competitions have used. We're debating whether there should be an opt-out for this year. 

We will of course apply at least the same level of transparency to the international jury.

Before we make this decision, I would like to ask for feedback on this, and whether there are edge cases we should consider where such transparency would be harmful. I'll take 1 week to gather some feedback on this, and then we'll make a final decision. You can respond to this on this mailing list, or privately to me. 

Warmly,

Lodewijk