![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday, June 14th, 2003 11:22 pm
(no subject)
Could someone remind me why in teh name of God I love my job? *grins* Actually, my boss did today.
It's been very busy since I was hired, as we are changing computer systems and well, it's a massive big deal here. Think the apocalypse and Christmas wrapped up in a massive big, world-changing, earth-shattering, pen-breaking sort of deal for us--the new system has been the Be All and End All of Thought since the first designs were tentatively approved three years ago. And so, there hasn't been much time to do stuff. And I was one fo the first new hires in a batch and had been sort of shuffled into my job since the person I was replacing was leaving three days later, and--I suppose I have to consider it a compliment. I think they forgot I was a new hire. I was expected to know how to handle the front desk by the end of the first week--by Friday of the next week, it was so habit that I don't think anyone really remembered I hadn't worked there for a while.
So my boss calls me into her office to explain procedure for when my probationary six month period is over and shows me the evauluation sheet they'll use. I hadn't--I really didn't think anyone was paying attention to me all that much, since important things were going on and we've been in countdown to the rollout of the new system, but she mentioned several times I was exceeding expectations in several categories of evaluation.
*blinks* How did that happen?
So I'm exhausted and not hungry and really, really want to sleep for about two weeks straight, and seriously, I'd kill to shoot up some espresso straight into the vein, but. That was just good to know. I don't know everything there is to know yet, and I'm still learning stuff every day that I had no idea existed before, but it's a huge compliment, I think, that no one really knew I *didn't* know it. It assumes a competence I can't claim yet, which--good for the ego.
Sleep? Who the hell needs sleep when your BOSS thinks you're doing a great job?
She also very seriously asked me if anyone had been in any way harassing (?????) and firmly explained that if anything happened at any time, I was to tell her immediately. I have no idea where that came from, but hey.
Part II: Red K
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
blackfall and I had this argument a few weeks ago. I was lost in appreciation for pretty RedClark, and blackfall said she was bored with him.
This discussion has been going on everywhere, and as I am no less prone to annouce my opinion from on high (kitchen chair, even!), lalala, but blackfall's making me rethink it a little more. So I can sound less insane and anti-Clark, as I have Given Up the Ways of Hating Characters.
No, really! I have! I HAVE!
Anyway.
I was too tired last night to actually explain what the awards are, and I feel kind of weird about dropping it on fandom and then not, well, explaining what we're doing. *grins* My own fault. I made the timeline, and I hate to be late for anything.
Okay, to start off, the name is byslodwick, who rocks, just so all know. Tara and I had been tossing around the vague concept for awhile, but I've never enjoyed fic awards very much because my first experience with them was the ASC awards, which spoiled me muchly.
Background
As stated in the rules, the ASC Awards, I think the second awards ever founded on the web for fanfiction, was founded on the concept of feedback-based voting. There were two motivations for it.
1.) recognize outstanding fiction
2.) feedback
It's more complex than the one, two, three system, and does require more work and more participation by readers, but on the other hand, it gives one of the greatest payoffs I've seen--in Trek, four solid weeks of almost nothing but people writing feedback out about the stories they loved. Talking about stories. Discussing them. Finding stories you've never read or seen, forgot about, rediscovered.
The argument made at the time, against the awards itself, was that just having a feedback fest should be enough. One of the coordinators stated that yes, that would be great, if people would do it, but incentive is incentive. And awards ARE an incentive.
Over LJ, people have discussed the fact that the feedback has dropped somewhat, and this week, while talking to Tara, it hit me that this would be a way to see if we could change that. At least a little, for a few weeks. So Tara and I got together a kind of plan for the idea. Celli came in to help me work out the formula so the voting would be fair. I'll get to the reason for that later. Slodwick jumped in happily to help out and agreed to take a week as word counter, and we split up the weeks between us.
Methodology
For this, most people don't need to worry about it, but I wanted to be completely above-board with how the feedback will be calculated.
Pure word count, which was our first thought, skewed toward people like me and Thamiris and Te and others, who tend to give epic feedback when we can. Yes, you've all seen my LJ when I get into a story, so I can pull off five hundred words about a story, no sweat. I didn't want this to skew voting against people who write shorter but also wonderful feedback, or those who simply didn't have that much to say about the story other than they liked it a great deal.
The point system reflects this. It wasn't random--I ran simulations using five pretend people and their votes until I got one that seemed to be a good compromise between short and long feedback and the number of people who feedbacked a story. Celli worked out how to count those in, so we had a system that, while it certainly isn't flawless, will keep long feedbackers from having too large a skew on how it turns out. If anyone's interested in the original math and the simulations, I can send the three I narrowed it down to, as well as pertinent information, so feel free to email me.
Categories
Tara, Celli, Slod, and I worked out the categories as best we could. Considering the fact that slash is pretty dominant, at least in the circles we run in, we wanted to assure that any and all stories would have a chance. Good het, good gen, some categories restricted to only specific pairings and specific type. Any questions, comments, or clarifications of chosen categories would be loved.
Other Relevant Information
The awards are not limited by anything but time. You can feedback as many stories as you want in as many categories as you want. You can nominate as many stories as you want in as many categories as you want. There is NO LIMIT. The point is the feedback, as much as you can on as many stories as you like. Concievably, you COULD put every relevant story from every SV archive up in all appropriate categories. The final tally for what makes round two will be how many nominations a story recieved--the top thirty will move on. My major reason for doing that is because long lists of stories frankly, are intimidating.
For feedbacking, if you want to feedback ten stories in the same category? Run with it. Again, no limits--make the authors happy.
Coordinator Participation
All coordinators will be participating as time allows, but considering I'm helping to run them, I'll be putting off both nominations and actual feedback until two days before the end of the voting period.
LJ posting
The community is enabled with non-member and anonymous posting, so anyone can send feedback and reply to posts. For those who wish to do it by email instead, an email addy has been provided, and all results will be posted to LJ by one of the coordinators after the email addy is verified. There is also the webpage at http://illusions.illuminatedtext.com/thetreasury/awards.html, which has the rules stated out as well. As required, I'll be adding more information, such as the final nomination tallies after the first round is complete so people uncomfortable with/unable to use LJ even as anonymous will be encouraged to post. I'm mulling looking into automated scripts for this, but that is--oh so damn complex. And well. *grins* I'm a lousy programmer.
The Treasury, as well as my LJ, is open to any concerns or questions anyone may have. And I need more coffee. Now.
*looks at Things I Must Do*
*sighs*
And my vacation isn't until October. *sighs* At least Bethy found us a nice place to stay.
*happy thoughts*
It's been very busy since I was hired, as we are changing computer systems and well, it's a massive big deal here. Think the apocalypse and Christmas wrapped up in a massive big, world-changing, earth-shattering, pen-breaking sort of deal for us--the new system has been the Be All and End All of Thought since the first designs were tentatively approved three years ago. And so, there hasn't been much time to do stuff. And I was one fo the first new hires in a batch and had been sort of shuffled into my job since the person I was replacing was leaving three days later, and--I suppose I have to consider it a compliment. I think they forgot I was a new hire. I was expected to know how to handle the front desk by the end of the first week--by Friday of the next week, it was so habit that I don't think anyone really remembered I hadn't worked there for a while.
So my boss calls me into her office to explain procedure for when my probationary six month period is over and shows me the evauluation sheet they'll use. I hadn't--I really didn't think anyone was paying attention to me all that much, since important things were going on and we've been in countdown to the rollout of the new system, but she mentioned several times I was exceeding expectations in several categories of evaluation.
*blinks* How did that happen?
So I'm exhausted and not hungry and really, really want to sleep for about two weeks straight, and seriously, I'd kill to shoot up some espresso straight into the vein, but. That was just good to know. I don't know everything there is to know yet, and I'm still learning stuff every day that I had no idea existed before, but it's a huge compliment, I think, that no one really knew I *didn't* know it. It assumes a competence I can't claim yet, which--good for the ego.
Sleep? Who the hell needs sleep when your BOSS thinks you're doing a great job?
She also very seriously asked me if anyone had been in any way harassing (?????) and firmly explained that if anything happened at any time, I was to tell her immediately. I have no idea where that came from, but hey.
Part II: Red K
blackfall and I had this argument a few weeks ago. I was lost in appreciation for pretty RedClark, and blackfall said she was bored with him.This discussion has been going on everywhere, and as I am no less prone to annouce my opinion from on high (kitchen chair, even!), lalala, but blackfall's making me rethink it a little more. So I can sound less insane and anti-Clark, as I have Given Up the Ways of Hating Characters.
No, really! I have! I HAVE!
Anyway.
I was too tired last night to actually explain what the awards are, and I feel kind of weird about dropping it on fandom and then not, well, explaining what we're doing. *grins* My own fault. I made the timeline, and I hate to be late for anything.
Okay, to start off, the name is by
slodwick, who rocks, just so all know. Tara and I had been tossing around the vague concept for awhile, but I've never enjoyed fic awards very much because my first experience with them was the ASC awards, which spoiled me muchly.Background
As stated in the rules, the ASC Awards, I think the second awards ever founded on the web for fanfiction, was founded on the concept of feedback-based voting. There were two motivations for it.
1.) recognize outstanding fiction
2.) feedback
It's more complex than the one, two, three system, and does require more work and more participation by readers, but on the other hand, it gives one of the greatest payoffs I've seen--in Trek, four solid weeks of almost nothing but people writing feedback out about the stories they loved. Talking about stories. Discussing them. Finding stories you've never read or seen, forgot about, rediscovered.
The argument made at the time, against the awards itself, was that just having a feedback fest should be enough. One of the coordinators stated that yes, that would be great, if people would do it, but incentive is incentive. And awards ARE an incentive.
Over LJ, people have discussed the fact that the feedback has dropped somewhat, and this week, while talking to Tara, it hit me that this would be a way to see if we could change that. At least a little, for a few weeks. So Tara and I got together a kind of plan for the idea. Celli came in to help me work out the formula so the voting would be fair. I'll get to the reason for that later. Slodwick jumped in happily to help out and agreed to take a week as word counter, and we split up the weeks between us.
Methodology
For this, most people don't need to worry about it, but I wanted to be completely above-board with how the feedback will be calculated.
Pure word count, which was our first thought, skewed toward people like me and Thamiris and Te and others, who tend to give epic feedback when we can. Yes, you've all seen my LJ when I get into a story, so I can pull off five hundred words about a story, no sweat. I didn't want this to skew voting against people who write shorter but also wonderful feedback, or those who simply didn't have that much to say about the story other than they liked it a great deal.
The point system reflects this. It wasn't random--I ran simulations using five pretend people and their votes until I got one that seemed to be a good compromise between short and long feedback and the number of people who feedbacked a story. Celli worked out how to count those in, so we had a system that, while it certainly isn't flawless, will keep long feedbackers from having too large a skew on how it turns out. If anyone's interested in the original math and the simulations, I can send the three I narrowed it down to, as well as pertinent information, so feel free to email me.
Categories
Tara, Celli, Slod, and I worked out the categories as best we could. Considering the fact that slash is pretty dominant, at least in the circles we run in, we wanted to assure that any and all stories would have a chance. Good het, good gen, some categories restricted to only specific pairings and specific type. Any questions, comments, or clarifications of chosen categories would be loved.
Other Relevant Information
The awards are not limited by anything but time. You can feedback as many stories as you want in as many categories as you want. You can nominate as many stories as you want in as many categories as you want. There is NO LIMIT. The point is the feedback, as much as you can on as many stories as you like. Concievably, you COULD put every relevant story from every SV archive up in all appropriate categories. The final tally for what makes round two will be how many nominations a story recieved--the top thirty will move on. My major reason for doing that is because long lists of stories frankly, are intimidating.
For feedbacking, if you want to feedback ten stories in the same category? Run with it. Again, no limits--make the authors happy.
Coordinator Participation
All coordinators will be participating as time allows, but considering I'm helping to run them, I'll be putting off both nominations and actual feedback until two days before the end of the voting period.
LJ posting
The community is enabled with non-member and anonymous posting, so anyone can send feedback and reply to posts. For those who wish to do it by email instead, an email addy has been provided, and all results will be posted to LJ by one of the coordinators after the email addy is verified. There is also the webpage at http://illusions.illuminatedtext.com/thetreasury/awards.html, which has the rules stated out as well. As required, I'll be adding more information, such as the final nomination tallies after the first round is complete so people uncomfortable with/unable to use LJ even as anonymous will be encouraged to post. I'm mulling looking into automated scripts for this, but that is--oh so damn complex. And well. *grins* I'm a lousy programmer.
The Treasury, as well as my LJ, is open to any concerns or questions anyone may have. And I need more coffee. Now.
*looks at Things I Must Do*
*sighs*
And my vacation isn't until October. *sighs* At least Bethy found us a nice place to stay.
*happy thoughts*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
From:I've not read enough to really nominate stories, I guess, but it will be great to read the recommended stories and to discuss them. I'm really looking forward to this.
(- reply to this
- thread
- link
)
no subject
From:Thanks for the comments! Now if it will only WORK....
*g*
(- reply to this
- parent
- top thread
- link
)
no subject
From:So just FWIW, I thought I'd say, Jenn, sweetie, I personally don't think the sky will fall in if SV fandom has awards. I'm kind of surprised it hasn't had them before now, in fact, and I'm rather impressed that the version proposed at The Treasury allows for discussion and recommendations in a central place, so that the spotlight can hit stories that may not have garnered sufficient attention when they appeared. I think that could be valuable, even if the eventual winners turn out to be the usual suspects.
I do think that in life, some people can take awards too seriously; and again, in life, some organizations can devote too much time to them and the politicking that grows around them -- time better spent creating. However, I don't see any reason to assume as a matter of course that that will happen here. Using these awards as a way to prompt discussion and attention could be a boon, a nice excuse to look at some stories again and give a pat on the back -- and then we all move on and get back to work. It needn't change SV fandom irrevocably, in my view; not unless people act like idiots. Which, of course, can happen anywhere, but I'm not going to make assumptions about it ahead of time.
(- reply to this
- thread
- link
)
no subject
From:Remember, stupid idealist here? *g* If I have to start from a negative and prove that this is what I've outlined and what it CAN be, I will. If there's participation, and I don't believe anyone would participate with unethical motives, then this will happen the way I've outlined.
Discussion is good--the highlighting of everything that could go wrong and why, the worries about what it could be if it was misused. No one I've met online has ever given me reason to believe they'd misuse the system as set up. These concerns should be addressed and I think they have been very thoroughly.
*hugs* TEll me you're writing. *hopeful*
(- reply to this
- parent
- thread
- top thread
- link
)
no subject
From:I know what it's about!
So how's The Yard coming? *g*
We should IM sometime. If I ever get myself together...
(- reply to this
- parent
- top thread
- link
)
no subject
From:(- reply to this
- thread
- link
)
no subject
From:I hope you enjoy it!
(- reply to this
- parent
- top thread
- link
)
no subject
From:Gail
(- reply to this
- thread
- link
)
no subject
From:As for whether it will work--I want to believe it will. And I plan to keep believing that until the moment I'm proved to that the concept has failed.
I need to get TaraLJC's pollyanna icon now....hmmm.
(- reply to this
- parent
- top thread
- link
)