Nominations for the Dragon closed July 24, and after a week had passed I assumed I had not made the grade. I was sure of it last Thursday night when I received an email that had a link to the final ballot.
I opened the ballot, to see who HAD made the grade, and was startled to see my name there. The Dragon award apparently is less bureaucratic than some others, I suppose, and they simply released the final ballot the way the nominations fell.
That does lead to the question, did they tell anyone, or just put the ballot on a website somewhere and expect the information to diffuse by Brownian motion?
If a music festival had an award for "best song of the last year," they might not inform the bands until they had winners picked out. So in this case, they're treating authors like distant celebrities rather than part of the community that makes up the convention.
... I didn't say it was a good choice, just that I could follow the reasoning.
I know Jemisen blocks over-aggressively on twitter, so it's possible that's how notification was issued. (That's only a suggestion; I think it at least equally as likely they were not organized enough to get notifications out via email, and that it's also possible they simply didn't even try.)
I followed her a while ago and she blocked me quite quickly. I hope it was an impersonal worst-possible-scenario prophylactic block, so to speak, not anything in my posting history. As it was I didn't take it personally, I'm sure she gets a lot of crap in her mentions.
That's what I meant by over-aggressively. She's got me blocked, she unblocked me when I pointed it out, and then did so again. She's using block lists from other people to do this.
My bet would be that there's a double standard at work here. Scalzi is not little people, so he must be listened to even if they don't want to. Alyson Littlewood is not as well known or as male, so they can thumb their noses at her with impunity.
Alternative theory: they were OK with scalzi jumping ship when it was just scalzi, but now they fear a mass exodus of legitimate authors, leaving them with a nomination list of truly awful crap and nothing else. So they have changed tactics.
I'd have to dig through file770, but I'm pretty sure she was the first: she tried to withdraw as soon as the ballots came out, while Scalzi was ignoring it until the puppies went nuts.
Social justice warriors don't stuff ballots, we hold our nose and vote for the person least likely to get us into yet another war against something that's nebulous and impossible to beat.
Except when we decide to treat elections as expressions of our personal virtue, and refuse to vote because neither / no candidate is entirely acceptable. :(
It seems very likely to me that Dragoncon _can't_ withdraw nominations from consideration. What can be seen about the nominating and voting process suggest, strongly, that all of this is "automated." That is to say, they have some software that tallies nominations, and then votes. Everything about their organization of this award says that it is not well-organized, nor does it command a lot of resources, especially not in terms of volunteer hours. I think they thought that running a major award would be easy, that all you'd have to do was just set up the best software... Yeah, no.
This is a mess of their own making, born of not really thinking things through, and I have only limited sympathy for them. But I suspect that they genuinely have no ability to change course, that all of these problems are baked in.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2017-08-09 10:51 am
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"We are aware of the rabid puppies and justice warriors[sic] efforts to effect[sic] the voting "
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If a music festival had an award for "best song of the last year," they might not inform the bands until they had winners picked out. So in this case, they're treating authors like distant celebrities rather than part of the community that makes up the convention.
... I didn't say it was a good choice, just that I could follow the reasoning.
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Alternative theory: they were OK with scalzi jumping ship when it was just scalzi, but now they fear a mass exodus of legitimate authors, leaving them with a nomination list of truly awful crap and nothing else. So they have changed tactics.
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(Anonymous) 2017-08-10 12:26 am (UTC)(link)no subject
This is a mess of their own making, born of not really thinking things through, and I have only limited sympathy for them. But I suspect that they genuinely have no ability to change course, that all of these problems are baked in.