STF

Awards - Lack of Transparency

Posted June 18, 2020, 10:28 p.m. by Steve Johnson (President) (Steve Johnson)

Posted by Commodore Steven Sigle (FComm, Infinite Fleet) in Awards - Lack of Transparency

Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director, EGO) in Awards - Lack of Transparency

Posted by Russell Watt (Public Nuisance for Life) in Awards - Lack of Transparency
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻
I’m concerned about the lack of transparency in the award nomination process.

According to the Awards FAQ, the 3-5 nominees with the most nominations are put on the ballot. There are some exceptions listed (like if there were two people with more than one nomination, and then a large number of single nominations, the single nominations are eliminated). And then the FAQ says that in any event, the organizers will just use their best judgment.

The nominations seem to act as a first round of voting in other words, yet we have zero transparency of what took place or how the results are determined.

So here are my concerns:

1) Why “3-5” for the cases where the exceptions don’t apply? Doesn’t this give the power to the organizers to just cut off someone from the ballot?

<SNIP

1) Why “3-5” for the cases where the exceptions don’t apply? Doesn’t this give the power to the organizers to just cut off someone from the ballot?

As stated before this was something that was passed down from the others that helped train me in how we do the awards. Nominations must have gotten at least two nominations to even be up for an award. From there the whole 3-5 thing is just a roughly limit, we make exceptions when needed. This helps us narrow down the voting so there are no 10-15 different options.

On a whole, as long as someone got at least two nominations they get in, the whole 3-5 concept is only in play if we had 10 or so people who got more than one nominations to not clog down the ballots. In cases like that, we would try to go with the players that had the highest totals and then hopefully that would give us a more clear field of 3-5 options. If though the fields cannot be narrowed down, we do not cut. If there is a field with 11 single nominations, or say 10 double nominations, but no one seemed to get more than anyone else, they would all make it.

<SNIP>

Why 3-5?
I can directly answer that question, I think. A long time ago, I was the organizer for the awards, in one of them, almost definitely the first ones I ran, I didn’t specify that there would be a limit to the number of nominees for an award. I also didn’t specify that nominees etc had to be nominated by two different members. As a result, when the nominations came in, I didn’t feel it was right to eliminate nominees because they were (A) only nominated by one peron or (B) some categories had many many people. As a result, the awards went on for a long time, with most of the time being spent by presenters on reading out the nominees. The 3-5 per category and the minimum of two nominators probably came in as a direct result of that.

Russell

Thanks Russ and Steven. I think there was ambiguity in my question. I meant “why 3 to 5”, not “why 3 to 5, if that makes sense. The range may be a helpful guideline, but it allows someone to say “this one is 3” and “this one is 5”. Let’s just say “the top 3” or “the top 4” or “the top 5” and say what the exceptions are. I think that will help in the future. Does that make sense?

Daniel

There is no guideline on the 3-5. The idea is we want ideally to have at least 3 people and if we can top it off at 5. No category has a hard 3, 4, or 5 limit. We don’t decide what category gets what numbers of nominees, the nomination process does that.

To be fair I try to allow everyone as long as they can get at least two nominations regardless of the category. There is exceptions made, but most times that has to do with only have two nominees cause no one else meet the criteria of two nominations, or we let in way more than 5 simply cause either a whole lot of people meet the 2 nomination requirement, or there was so few people who got more than one.

That has happened before where we had almost a dozen people cause no nominations gave us a clear split to break the number down.

Outside of these very loose guidelines, and I can’t stress enough guidelines and not rules, we let anyone in who can get at least two nominations.

I can personally promise for what you value my word that anyone who told you that someone should have had two nominations most likely didn’t. I can’t say mistakes don’t happen when trying to read some jumbled responses but that in lieu comes with the fact that we spent almost an entire work week painstakingly going over every single nomination to make certain no one who deserved to get on the ballot with two nominations didn’t slip our notice.

We are human and mistakes can happen of course, but even since this got brought up I went through it all once more and couldn’t see any glaring examples of people missing from the ballots cause they got two nominations.

Every year judgment calls have to be made to try and make this as fair as possible, and Kate and I spend weeks of our lives pouring into these ideas to make the awards the greatest they possibly can be. We are as always open to suggestions, and while posting the full nominations might sound easy it isn’t quite that way either due to the rawness or the data that we are forced to go over.

Seeing as these awards are meant to be a way for members to have fun, enjoy each other and just a way to connect with our fellow piers, along with not in any way being important to how the club is ran, I think that is the reason so much of it is just winged. No one wants to do the job cause you become crucified if just one thing doesn’t go the way they feel it should.

All,
At this time I would like to table this discussion. I know Steven and Kate have put in a good amount of work to help make the awards what they are today, but I think it would be worthwhile to review our process. But that will happen AFTER the awards are completed this term.

I wish to thank everyone for their patience while we investigated these concerns. At this time, I do not see any concerns that need to be further addressed for these awards. However, I do ask that Steven and Kate make the full list of nominations available to those who ask to see it, for the sake of transparency.

Steve Johnson
President - Star-Fleet.com


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