[Admin/RACCies] RACCies announcement/discussion prompt

[Martin Phipps]

saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au (Saxon Brenton) wrote in message news:<15f3bff1.0411051416.2e905db2 at posting.google.com>...
> .    It's coming up towards the time when the call for nominations for
> the annual RACCies awards will be called, sometime mid-to-late this month.
> As most of you will be aware, I was the only volunteer for the... honour... 
> of running the RACCies. I've been toying with various subplot/gag lines 
> for the awards presentations, but another topic has intruded into my 
> consciousness, and this is: declining voting numbers.
>      Exact numbers are not available to me, but previous RACCies 
> moderators (as well as Dvandom for the ASH-imprint-specific and recently-
> discontinued URNs) have commented on declining voter numbers. From 
> comments made by Jamie and Dvandom I understand that numbers are usually 
> at a half dozen or less.
>      Off the top of my head I have no particular ideas for increasing 
> that trend in the long term, since even another issue of Remember-To-
> Vote-At-The-RACCies-Or-I'll-Rip-Your-Arms-Off Man would probably just be 
> another moderately amusing stunt. Therefore, pending discussion with you, 
> my peers on rec.arts.comics.creative, I provisionally intend to run the 
> RACCies for three years, and then discontinue the awards.
>      Other than expressions of regret, are there any comments on this? 
> Are there any egregious errors to my reasoning which would be grounds 
> for indefinite continuance of the annual awards?

Wouldn't it be easier if eyrie.org could handle this sort of thing on
line?  I mean, there are plenty of websites that do on line polls. 
Presumably the nomination process could be done automatically on line
with people nominating over a certain period after which the poll
automatically becomes a question of voting for the items nominated. 
The whole process could be made automatic.  I don't know if such a
thing is feasible, if for example the necessary software required to
do such a thing is freely available or if anybody had any time to set
such a thing up.  (For one thing, on line polls don't mean much unless
there are a lot of people voting because there is nothing stopping
anyone from using two different computers and voting twice!) 
Alternatively, one could create a yahoo group and run a poll using
their software, except that, again, somebody could vote multiple times
using different yahoo ids.

The irony, of course, is that you have been doing the monthly reviews
in preparation for the RACCies and yet the monthly reviews are
probably more useful than the RACCies themselves which only ever have
one winner per category.  I'd do monthly reviews too except that then
I would have to read everything that was being posted and I don't want
to do that.  I feel no shame, however, in that I feel I have provided
more feedback than most people on RACC (and not all of it was well
recieved, to say the least!)

Martin