Will the numerical results of the Nigerian Blog Awards be revealed?

Posted on July 21, 2011 | Good Naija Girl | 11542 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fnigerianblogawards.com%2Fdiscussion%2Fwill-the-numerical-results-of-the-nigerian-blog-awards-be-revealed%2FWill+the+numerical+results+of+the+Nigerian+Blog+Awards+be+revealed%3F2011-07-21+05%3A45%3A31Good+Naija+Girlhttp%3A%2F%2Fnigerianblogawards.com%2F%3Fp%3D1154

The short answer is no, for the reasons outlined below. Due to the anticipated changes to the voting process for the 2012 Awards, the practice of announcing only the winners will most likely be upheld.

We did not define it as part of our process
According to the schedule of events, the winners are revealed. This is historically how the Nigerian Blog Awards have been run since their first year in 2010. The 2009 Naija Bloggers’ Awards (which was not run by me) also only revealed the winners.

The longest-running blog awards around, The Weblog Awards, which held their 11th awards this year, the recently-discovered Black Weblog Awards (in their 7th year of operation), and the South African Blog Awards also only reveal the winners. It was decided early on that the Nigerian Blog Awards would declare the winners only.

Revealing the numbers could help the legitimacy/credibility of the Awards
In the comments of earlier posts, some have said that the Nigerian Blog Awards should reveal the numerical counts to bring legitimacy to the Awards, that if you see the numbers then you’ll believe the results.

Not necessarily:

If you are skeptical about the results, seeing the numerical values may not convince you, because how will you know that the results being shown are the actual results and are not doctored? If X has been declared the winner, and if we were in the business of rigging the Awards, we’d be silly to post results that show Y as the actual winner. Even if screen shots were taken and provided to the public, someone might mention how easy it would be to use PhotoShop to doctor images. Short of sending all interested parties the login credentials for the back-end, there is no way a skeptic would know for sure that we haven’t “cooked the books”…unless a decision is made to trust the process.

As mentioned in the post on the integrity of the Awards, it’s hard to imagine why the results would be fixed, but maybe that’s naivete on our parts. Either way, each person reading this has to decide whether or not they’ll trust the Awards and the process laid out. We do not want to be in a position where we’re on the defensive and always having to prove our legitimacy.

The good news is the process will be changing for next year. Although there will still be a “popular vote” component, it will only be part of the process.

But wouldn’t seeing the results help a nominated blogger who lost see how s/he could improve?
At the moment there are over 800 blogs listed on our site. To be one of the finalists is an accomplishment. The polls are not visible to the public during the voting process, and this is to prevent the nominees from trying to stuff the ballot because they know they are “x” votes behind the current leader. If you find out that you were second place in the category you were nominated in, and that you lost by just two votes, it would be hard to use that information to tangibly impact your campaign next year, since you won’t know what the margin will be between first and second place in 2012. There are too many variables to control in the campaigning and voting processes for a nominee to predict how hard they have to work to win (though next year it won’t be strictly “popular vote”).

If you discover you were in last place in your category and got a very low number of votes, hopefully you’d be just as motivated as the first runner-up to strive to do better next year. The actual numerical result would hopefully not change the effort you’d put into blogging.

Some might just want to know how close or far they were from the winner, but this could backfire: those who thought they were closer to the winner may be disappointed to find out the true results, and some who lost by a very small margin may feel good that they were close, but could also feel that the margin was too close for the other nominee to be declared the winner. It could prolong any negative feelings those who did not win feel.

That last point is a lot more minor but we hope the first two points in particular explain why the process of announcing the winners only will likely be the way moving forward.

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