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Message: <blockquote data-quote="2WS-Steve" data-source="post: 3331094" data-attributes="member: 3289">Responding to the debate part:From what I understand judge candidates express their interest and post a brief bio and/or answer questions, then the public votes for the candidates they prefer.As far as I can tell there are no official rules against anyone running (someone correct me if I'm mistaken).But, generally, the people running have limited or no professional RPG industry experience.After the nomination/declaration period is over, the vote is then thrown to the public and they decide who the five judges will be, now using the Single Transferable Vote system.While one could also debate whether or not a representational system is best, or how many representatives such a system should have, I'll limit myself to one 2000+ year old intractable political debate per post.****Since the current format is purely democratic, I take it you're suggesting that there should be some additional formal rules restricting who can be nominated or nominate themself -- perhaps something like term limits, or some algorithm that prevents people with certain kinds of RPG industry experience from applying. But I'll let you present your own ideas since I'm not sure what restrictions you have in mind.Certainly some rules might make sense. We don't want three-year-olds as judges. However, the process already seems to cover that sort of issue.While I can understand a general desire to include a rule that prevents, say, Monte Cook from entering since that might lead to a bunch of professional full-time designers (with their superior name recognition) all being judges. However, I think any formal rule would either be too convoluted to parse, or rule out people like Piratecat who a large portion of the voting public would actually like to have the chance to vote for.As it is, we have the fallback plan of simply relying on the voters to decide who's too much of an insider to allow as judge. And that seems to have worked pretty well so far.As far as judge recidivism goes, we can at least come up with a clear rule regarding that. Perhaps no more than two or three years in a row, or some other format. I think ruling out any recidivism is a very bad idea, since past judging experience on such a major undertaking would be really useful.However, I also don't see and haven't seen a problem with just letting the vote handle that part too. It's not like congress where there's a big monetary incentive to stay in, nor do ENnie judges build up massive campaign war chests gleaned from all their E-publisher swag that help ensure that they get re-elected.That said, I am more open to some sort of rule that helps formalize the process of keeping new blood involved, maybe something like 4-5 years on necessitates 2 years off.Finally, I do want to point out that any such rules are anti-democratic. They are ways of achieving through legislation what one cannot achieve by convincing the public (unless the public is given a chance to vote on the meta-rules). As such, there is at least some reason to think that the default position should be to simply let the voters decide.When/if you rely to this please include some specific examples of the rules or restrictions you'd like added. It might be too late for this year but perhaps there could be a public vote on judge nomination rules for next year's ENnies.</blockquote>

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