Suggestion Box

[Roserade]

Here's where to suggest any ideas for awards, nominees, tournaments, etc. Basically if you have an idea and it has anything to do with the awards ceremony or related processes, feel free to post it and we'll have a look at it and consider it and all that good stuff! We had a number of changes and new concepts emerge during this year's awards season, so more than ever, we would love to receive feedback.

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We will, of course, accept feedback on any aspect of this season. However, to start out with, I have a guiding question I'd like to put forward towards the community, particularly awards presenters. This year, we had what felt like an unprecedented number of people drop their presentations during the work period. None of this was detrimental to the success of the ceremony, and we do not intend to shame anyone who dropped. At the same time, especially with a work period that was over double what the presentation work period has traditionally, and with fewer awards for people to grab, we've found ourselves wondering why this was the case. So the question that guides us from that is: what factors do you believe led to a high drop rate? Was it simply userbase fatigue, or is there a fault with having a longer work period, and is having a shorter work period inherently more motivating? Is there more we as a committee should do to incentivize working earlier or in different ways?

Feedback from anyone on this is appreciated. Again, this was a year of experimentation, so any sort of focused feedback we receive will help us refine the awards season to make it even better next year. Thank you!

 

[TPG+]

Speaking from experience here. Out of the allocated 'presentation time', I spend 95% doing anything else, and pick out one or two days to smash out all the ones I picked. This doesn't account for larger creative projects for presentations, where I do a little bit regularly (but I still tend towards explosive bouts of energy, which is just how I work).

So, my output doesn't really change regardless - I never intend to spend the entire timeframe making presentations.

Which is fine. I don't think making a presentation should take more than a day, and I know over the years that each committee has emphasised the lack of need for flashy, lengthy spectacles. People still make big presentations though, myself included! This makes me think Awards intrinsically motivates some people to pursue higher-effort endeavours (which is great if they can do it by the deadline!), but I don't think you can do anything about that except encourage people to scope appropriately.

[Edit: I think the whole 'people try and make presentations far beyond the recommended scope' thing probably comes down to the fact that we have the Favourite Awards Presentation category and the fact that the Awards Ceremony is by far the largest community event, meaning that you'll get the most eyes on whatever creative endeavour you've made if it's a presentation]

Some of the information only you will know, however. I'd suggest looking at your dropouts, and seeing if you can identify anything from the following points:
-Who dropped out?
--Have they presented before?
--Were they taking on multiple presentations? (This is important - 10 dropped presentations doesn't mean 10 people dropped out)
-Did they drop out before, during, or after the check-in?
-Had the drop-outs done *anything* prior to dropping?
-Did they say why they were dropping out?

A concrete suggestion would be to, during check-ins, ask each presenter to nominate a time in the future for a second check-in, especially if they don't have anything to show at that time. It gets them to think about how much they can do, if they can realistically achieve that in a smaller timeframe, and encourages good communication with the staff - if they're just going to do nothing, you'll also figure that out before the deadline, which gives backups more time to prepare something else.

E.g. message sent on July 18th
"Hey TPG, this is your official check-in! Let us know how the presentations are coming along. If you don't have anything for us right now, that's fine, but you'll need to give us a date within the next 10 days for a second check-in. You'll need to show something that indicates you've done at least some work, otherwise we'll let one of our backup presenters take over. If you need to drop out, let us know!"

"Hi team, my school term ends on July 21st. I'll be able to dedicate some time to presentations then, so I'll have something to show you by July 25th."

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I think having just one week for voting is good, and the changes to how the community awards worked were great. I think the misstep here was dedicating all the extra weeks solely to presentation time, and not backup time. Drop-outs happen every year, and things can get stressful if the workload on backups jumps up suddenly with just 7 days left. Having the presentation deadline be a hard 2 weeks before the ceremony (with the option for presenters to apply for a short extension if they have a reliable track record and can prove they've already done a good amount of work), with maybe 4 or 5 weeks time given for making presentations could work better.

I know that doesn't address the number of drop-outs - an ideal solution would minimize dropouts to near zero, but that would take a lot of analysis of information I don't have, so my suggestion instead prepares for that assumed inevitability.

This might be more work for you, but I would also be interested in looking at the relationship between the work done by presenters and when they dropped out, if there is one. It might be nothing, if all of your drop-outs just ditched the day before the deadline with nothing to show for it then, I dunno. Ban them forever?

 

[TPG+]

Also the Bonus Stars were a really good idea.

 

[Ai Hoshino]

This is not necessarily about the drop rate but it is still relevant to the question of "is the longer timeframe actually beneficial".

So as horrible as this may be to hear, I'm kind of a procrastinator, mainly when it comes to things I see as "projects" (including but not limited to schoolwork, recording for covers, and these presentations). Trust me when I say I don't know why this is the case and try as I might, can't really do much about it. If you give me a whole month to work on something I will probably do the majority of that work in the later half of that timeframe. This happened to be the case with presentations this year! I think the way it works in my mind, is I see we get like two extra weeks to work on presentations and my brain is like "oh you have tons of time you don't have to worry about most of these until later". I think I only really made substantial progress on one of my presentations by the time the first check-in rolled around.

Maybe the longer timeframe was really helpful for some people, but I don't think it really helped me personally because I definitely still ended up doing most of my presentation work in the normal timeframe that we've had in past years. I think a shorter deadline is just more of a motivator to actually get things done for me.

Additionally, even with the longer timeframe to work, I think this year's 'no extensions' thing was a bit of a detriment. Personally, I had a situation with a presentation that very nearly required me to start it over from scratch. Fortunately, this did not end up happening as I was able to salvage more of it than I thought I would. However, if that wasn't the case, then that presentation more than likely would have been dropped, as I would not have been able to complete it from the beginning in time. Additionally, in the event of a personal or family emergency really close to the deadline, there's a chance I may not have finished any presentations at all this year. I'm not saying having a hard deadline right off the bat is a bad thing, but flexibility is something that should be taken into consideration when deciding if the presentation deadline is the absolute final deadline for everything. Life is a beautiful mess that doesn't care if you have things due this week, it will throw curveballs at you anyways.

 

[Lin Beifong]

Can we make it a requirement that you have to put the name and number of your award at the top of your presentation post?

I sometimes try to look at previous presentations and it is always a big hassle for me if I'm looking for a specific one, to spot it while scrolling through the thread because presentation posts tend to be large and often only identify themselves at the end of them.

I've usually done this with mine in the past. Just a "F17 - Least Favorite Christmas Ornament" followed by a helpful "by General Entropy" so you can identify presentation posts, their purpose, and their author at a glance, instead of doing this awkward shuffle of scrolling down the page, locating the end of every post, finding the one you want, then scrolling back up again so you can actually read it.

 

[Dr. Alexander Wexlyn]

I think on the topic of extensions/deadlines, there is a fair method as to how to determine whether someone should get one or not that should also weed out people who are just extending because they forgot or don't care. Obviously you can't have the deadline just be the day before Awards, because that's a massive risk when it comes to people who drop or total flakes, but there's a middle ground here.

Extensions should be fully allowed based on factors such person's past reliability, whether they have a solid plan for their presentation, and whether they can show that they have been working on it in some capacity.

I wouldn't say that an extension should necessarily need all three of these elements, but I do think that these are useful criteria for Awards staff to judge whether an extension should be granted with. If someone has reliably finished presentations every year previously regardless of timeframe, I think they should be given the benefit of the doubt that they should continue to do so. Likewise, if someone can demonstrate that they have a solid presentation in progress but need a couple more days due to personal circumstances and have a plan to get it done within that timeframe, then I also believe an extension should be completely fine.

If someone rolls in with no Awards history (or a history of last minute dropping...) and no ideas, no WIP, and no plan, and asks for an extension however, it may be better to give it to a backup instead, and Awards staff can make that judgement. I don't think it needs to be a black and white case of either everyone getting extensions or no one getting them. It should be on a case by case basis, and if anyone complains that they got their award taken away because Awards Staff didn't seem them reliable, then they can suck it up.

At the end of the day, the ideal is to get high quality presentations, and if someone was unable to complete their presentation before the deadline but needs an extra day, it is almost always preferable to give that person time to finish their presentation than to just scrap their work and have a backup rush something out imo.

Speaking of backups, I actually think the idea of giving backups more time is a great one, because it also gives more time for extensions without cutting too close to the Awards line. Instead of 6 weeks until the deadline and 1 week for replacements, why not 5 weeks for presentations and 2 weeks for replacements? There might be a lot more people willing to take on replacements in case of a mass drop if the deadline wasn't so close to awards, especially in a world where most of us are adults working full time jobs now.

 

[winstein]

Something I have noticed is how Camwoodstock reacted positively when I did a transcript for my presentation, which involves describing actions and the order of what the characters are saying. Certain users might have some challenges with the conventional way we understand how presentations are read, so it could be helpful for them.

So, I wonder if it's a good practice to prepare a transcript for a presentation even if more work had to be done. Of course those who already written on the forum is fine. This is mainly for those who do comics or videos, though I imagine that the ones who do videos would be more work. Probably it's not in everyone's interest to do so, so I imagine that it might have been optional.

Thank you for reading.

 

[Shmaluigi]

Add me to the list of people who didn't really take advantage of the extra time. I'll be real, I'm a cereal serial procrastinator for one thing, but also as I look back on it, part of the problem for me is that all the extra time was frontloaded. In past years, the polls would go up, the June 'Shroom issue would be released the week after that, and we'd have a few weeks before polls closed. I looked at last year's schedule and the polls closed one week before the July issue came out. If you played your cards right, you could easily have your work for the issue done by the time results were sent out.

With the new schedule, there was one week after the June issue came out and then it was off to the races here's your poll results. So besides some minor prep work, I wasn't really able to do anything with that time because I was mostly focused on The 'Shroom since it was the earlier deadline of the two and therefore higher priority.

This is a very "it is what it is" problem, so I'm not suggesting any changes here. There's nothing that can be done to fix it while keeping the benefit of extra time outside of delaying the ceremony which doesn't really make sense to do. I'm probably an outlier anyway, for people with a smaller or non-existent 'Shroom workload, it's not really much of an issue.

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For the hard deadline issue, I can see both sides here. On one hand, it's to be expected that there are going to be some presenters who run up to (and past) deadlines, especially when unexpected things come up, which is why I think it's a good idea to have a deadline that's a little earlier than needed so you have some wiggle room. On the other hand, they do need to be somewhat strict because backup presenters need time to work. Those slots need to be filled eventually by someone, it's not like 'Shroom deadlines where if a section doesn't get in it's just not there that month.

I do like the idea of allowing some users more time based on their past track record and/or demonstrated progress, as well as having more time allocated for backup presentations. With the regular deadline being farther from the ceremony, that would also add more flexibility for extensions, so it's a win-win.

 

[Calamity Coyote]

No more apples in the vending machine, please!

Actually, I do have a suggestion: maybe an award for best/worst character design?