Seriously, it's not a secret society. Your great-grandfather didn't have to be a member, and you don't need to know the secret handshake. The main qualifications are:
1) Desire to help the L4W community.
2) Time.
3) Energy.
If you have those three covered, we're happy to have you.
I'd add two more:
4) A basic working knowledge of the rules. (Or at least a willingness to look things up a lot.)
5) A history of positive participation in the community; we want people who "get it", that we feel comfortable trusting with this thing we've put time in on.
Not that I think any of those are lacking, in this case; just striving for a modicum of completeness. (Is that an oxymoron?)
The process for adding character reviewers is fairly simple; you send an email to
l4w.judges@gmail.com saying that you'd like to help out. We fool around with the forwarding filters on the judge account so that you get character submissions. Then we usually send you a test message to check that the filters work, and, if whoever's doing it has time, a summary of the current outstanding character submissions. That's it, you're in.
The process for adding judges has historically been less transparent. Usually what happens is that one of the current judges will send an email round suggesting one or two people to invite on as full judges. We discuss it, and if there's consensus, we send them an email asking them to sign on. Thus, most of the process has happened in private. Why? Well, sooner or later I imagine we'll find ourselves in a position where somebody wants to be a judge and we have real objections. That seems like the sort of thing that's best not discussed in public.
In this case, we've had a call for volunteers here but haven't had any discussion yet on the judge list -- I'm just finding out about it now, for example. So, we're not ignoring you, really! We're just slow.
