Final wrap up

Posted on July 21, 2010 | Good Naija Girl | 15 Comments

While the awards received praise, we also receive some…well, let’s just say it wouldn’t fall under the category of praise. And that’s no problem: while we all like to hear good things about ourselves, it’s not realistic to expect that every step you make will be met with applause. And sometimes, it’s the critiques that really help us grow.

However, constructive criticism that points out where improvements could be made, and/or includes solutions or suggestions to make these improvements, will move things further along than calling the the awards, including the work of all the people who gave up sleep and time to organize it, “staged”, “a sad joke” and other things.

A large number of the criticism the awards received came from people who felt the awards were somehow “rigged” or skewed to favour a certain group of bloggers, because several bloggers were nominated for multiple awards in both Group A and Group B categories and won in their categories. Others were baffled that certain blogs (or their own blog) wasn’t nominated. As was stated many times, the way these awards and the previous one were set up, if you want to be nominated or want to receive votes, you have to ask for them from your readers, family members, friends, colleagues, whoever you know. The awards were not rigged and it should not surprise anyone that the bloggers who were doing some serious campaigning on their blogs or on twitter received the most nominations or votes. As one blogger commented, there are some bloggers who have been blogging for a long time and who have made a name for themselves that will not have to do any campaigning: they are well known enough that they will get nominated by fans whenever the opportunity arises.

Unfortunately, the majority of the criticism came from people who do not appear to have read the entry on how the awards were organized. This led to issues being brought up that were moot points as the rules were set out at the beginning. If you only visited the blog to read the list of nominees or winners and made a sweeping judgement, assumption or generalization about the awards, then you may understand why your comments did not receive much attention.

We did receive some constructive criticism that will certainly be taken into account as we plan for the 2011 awards:

We will do a lot more publicity before the awards begin, so that all who want to take part have an opportunity to do so. If you follow us on twitter or check the blog regularly, you will not miss out. If you don’t want to do either, but do want to be aware of the awards, you can submit your email address so that we can let you know when the awards begin in 2011 (please leave your email address in the comments).

There may be a better way to organize the Group A awards. More research needs to be done and the final results will be shared before the current process is changed.

The challenge of how to allow all who want to vote the ability to do so, without also allowing people to stuff the ballot, is a serious one that must be addressed. The focus this year was preventing ballot stuffing, even at the expense of preventing some from voting, but hopefully a better solution can be found.

The challenge of preventing people from nominating their blog or a blog they like in all the categories will continue to be addressed. It will be even less tolerated moving forward, and may be grounds for disqualification.

We received a comment that perhaps someone who had been blogging for over two years didn’t qualify to be called a Grandma/Grandpa blogger. We will consider changing the number of years that a person has to have been blogging to be called a veteran blogger.

Finally, I had several people who kept telling me that you can’t please everyone, and that is very true. For every change that we make to improve the awards, I know there will be people who either liked it better the old way or are still dissatisfied with the new change. As long as we think with a “community view” and not the view of what is best for us individually, I think we’ll be ok.

Final wrap up

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