While I am throwing out random musings and selections where they do not belong…
Have you given thought to having more than one judging team? Provided you can drum up the people for participation, it would be interesting to see this put in place. Two teams could ease the burden for all judges as well, which would provide for a better chance of timely feedback. For instance, had each of you only had two matches to judge instead of four, feedback would have likely been a lot quicker, even with the work situation.
I understand that different judges would provide potentially different results, but as long as the same judges review the same stories, it shouldn’t be too big an issue. Sure, personal preference of judges might come into play, but this will be a factor no matter how many judges there are. It wouldn’t affect the competition round for round though. Once at the end, five judges (or three) could be selected to judge the final two stories.
This could even be done with a pool of five judges where three are randomly selected to judge each match. Either solution would help ease the demand on the judges. It might also help avoid a situation where a judge might be judging a friend’s story (or a friend who doesn’t/can’t compete because they are close to one judge.) Additionally, if the real world should interfere with a judge’s life (or even multiple judges), one of the other judges could step in and the tournament could progress.
While I’m making suggestions that assume we have infinite manpower… It might be a good idea to have the contest organizer not judge the competitions. That in itself is a big amount of work. Organizing rounds, selecting the pictures, posting the results, etc. takes a lot of time. Using this as a separate position, or as an emergency fill in judge might be a good option. As an added benefit, this change would also free up an involved person to provide outside critique while waiting on judging results. It’d be interesting to hear how or why the pictures were selected as they were and what stories they might have drummed up inside the image selector’s head. This would all help tide the time between the time the stories are posted and the time the decisions are posted.
Anyway, I guess that is all for now. Once again, none of these selections are meant as a criticism of the way things are being run now. I think you all are doing an outstanding job. I just thought I’d share my random musings.
