Posted by Steven Sigle in STF March 2021 Awards

Posted by Vice Admiral Sarah Hemenway (President) in STF March 2021 Awards

Posted by Fleet Captain Sharon Miller (Supervisor of Experiments) in STF March 2021 Awards
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻
I hope everyone is having a fantastic year. As per tradition, it is time once more to roll the red carpets and strike up the band cause the STF Awards are beginning. For those of you who are new, or just need a refresher, the STF Awards is our annual tradition where we try to go out of the way to have our best and brightest chance to shine. You will have one week of nominations before we will close up that part of the awards. From there we will go through and tally up the nominations, the ones with the most will get on our ballots as we then begin to email everyone who was nominated in a roleplaying category for a chance to provide us with excerpts in order to let you shine the loudest and brightest. All nominations must be related to the current awards period, which is from June 2020 to March 2021. If the character/player has not been played or involved in the club during that period, they are not eligible.

To begin nominating, please click the following link. https://www.star-fleet.com/awards/nominations/

For additional questions and answers, please see the FAQ here https://docs.google.com/document/d/16l9NE5PcrCYsJrKPycAHQmQM_MA8l0XOaFSfeSCtgrs/edit?usp=sharing

STF Awards Road Map:

March 22nd, 2021 - Nominations Open.
March 29th, 2021 - Nominations Close.
March 31st, 2021 - All emails for nominees that are eligible for excerpts will be sent out.
April 4th, 2021 - Excerpts due.
April 5th, 2021 - Voting begins.
April 12th, 2021 - Voting closes.
April 13th -16th - Awards tallied and Award certificates created for winners.
April 17th & 18th, 2021 - Awards ceremony TBD.

As always, any questions or concerns you may reach out to Kate O’Neil, myself, or our newest member of the Award Squad, Ben Z. All of us can be found in Discord, or emailed via our contact pages.

~STF Awards Coordinators
Steven Sigle, Kate O’Neill, Ben Z

Hi,

I have a question please. It’s been a few years since I participated in an awards ceremony at STF, but I feel like I remember a lot more rules back then around who was eligible for certain categories. Like, one that sticks in my mind was, if a player held a DH spot anywhere in the club then they couldn’t be nominated for a JO character in that same department. Or that an alt-RP area could not be nominated for Best Ship. But I don’t see anything on the google doc FAQ around this (or criteria for any of the individual awards beyond the X-Fleet ones).

Have we simplified the awards now and those rules no longer exist?
Do they still exist but are not being referenced anywhere currently (I feel like the criteria used to be stated against each award on the actual nomination form itself)?
Or is my memory horrible (I already know this is a yes, lol) and I’m simply misremembering the entire thing?

Thanks.

You are correct that we have in time since removed those restrictions. Anyone can be up as long as they have a rostered with posting limits in the time of the awards season which for this year will be June 2020 to March 2021. We did this as the excerpts added the goal is to highlight role-playing and showcase the skills. As for Alt RPG (except for X-Fleet ships), all of them are eligible for the best ship. A lot of this information will be added shortly into our FAQ to clear things up.

So please really think of who has done the role the best, on all your ships, and who you truly support. Every nomination helps to give someone a chance and we do encourage nominating every field to really widen up the options and give as many people chances as possible.

~Steven Sigle

Thank you for the clarification. I just wanted to be sure.

• Sharon

Thank you for the insightful question, Sharon.

It seems like there are some detailed rules to ensuring eligibility for these awards that needs to be publicized on the actual nomination form before nominations can be accepted. I would hate to see club members work to fill out a long nomination form only to have their nominees be ineligible for some reason because they didn’t think they had a question about it. I know that it wouldn’t occur to me to read all of these details for something that’s supposed to be a fun recognition.

Please discontinue collecting nominations until a clear definition of eligibility for each award is presented on the award page and adjust the calendar appropriately. The new calendar needs to be posted with at least three days of notice before the events begin so that questions like this can come up and be addressed beforehand, ensuring this is a transparent and accessible process.

Thank you,

• Sarah, Prez

I’m not quite sure I understand the issue here. We have in our FAQ this information, and as the nominations is a static form that I cannot change on a whim like this. We do not eliminate people for ineligible nominations, instead, we reach out and help the person who nominated when this comes up if there is any problem. This is why there is a week in between nominations and award voting to properly help members. I am more than willing to answer any and all questions people have but our goal is to allow as many people as humanly possible in, which again is explained in our FAQ.

I do feel this could have all been fixed up with a quick email/DM that didn’t need to slow or stop players from nominating. We are not in the business to make this harder for players, in fact, we spend a great large portion of our time making certain everyone who can get in has a chance to get in.

~Steven Sigle

There are important rules that people need to follow in order to produce valid nominations in a document that is not called “The Rules” or anything like that; it’s called “Frequently Asked Questions.” What if the person doesn’t think to “ask a question”? What if they just fill it out because it seems obvious? What if they don’t like using Gmail? What if they don’t want to ask a question about it because this is supposed to be an accessible and easy process to recognize fellow club members and instead there is a several hundred word document you need to read in order to know how to do it “right”? We’re all exhausted and burned out and dealing with pandemic stress. Let’s make this as easy as possible for people by at least giving them some guidance if there’s a chance their nomination could be thrown out.

If you’d like, I’d be happy to summarize things into short snippets of explanatory text, but I’m not following why you can’t change text on a form. It might not be something “you-as-in-Steven” can change, but this is not a big ask. As I previously stated, nominations need to be paused until it is resolved. I’m sorry that I wasn’t more involved in this to begin with to catch it before it became confusing for the membership.

• Sarah, President