Dragon Awards Updates

The inaugural Dragon Awards will be presented at Dragon Con on Labor Day Weekend.

A Dragon Awards administrator previewed for File 770 one tool they will use to prevent voting abuse, and explained the award’s eligibility period.

ONE VOTE. The Dragon Awards announcement on April 4 established a one-fan one-vote philosophy.

  • “Using a dedicated Dragon Awards website, fans can nominate one (and only one) of their favorite properties”, and
  • “Fans will be allowed to vote just once for each category’s best”

The Fan FAQ makes it a rule:

Who can vote or nominate?

Anyone can nominate and vote or just vote for finalists, once only please…

Filer Danny Sichel asked the administrators of the Dragon Awards –

How will you ensure that people only vote, and only nominate, once each?

Dave Cody, Senior Director and Co-Chairman of Dragon Con answered —

We’re going to employ various tools to combat ballot box stuffing when the actual voting starts.

Also, for nominations, it won’t be possible to slate or overload the nominations for each category. We’re going to use experts in the various disciplines to create the final nomination lists after examining all the nominations.

Yes, I am being deliberately vague so that those trying to game the system won’t know what exactly we are doing to combat any shenanigans.

ELIGIBILITY PERIOD. On April 14, the Dragon Awards site announced this refinement to its Eligibility Period:

We have updated the eligibility period for works for consistency across the site. Works released between 7/1/2015 and 6/30/2016 are eligible for this year’s awards. We will maintain this rolling year of eligibility moving forward so that there are no gaps or overlaps in publishing works.

Therefore, the Dragon Awards Candidate FAQ now reads —

When does my book, game, comic or show have to have been released to qualify for this year?

To be eligible for the 2016 Dragon Awards the book, comic, game, movie, or, at least, one episode of any series has to have been released between July 1, 2015, and the close of nominations, June 30, 2016.

And Dave Cody extrapolates that into the future —

Eligibility for each award will cover quarters 3 and 4 of one year and quarters 1 and 2 of the following year. Therefore for the awards in 2017 the eligibility period will be from 7/1/16 to 6/30/17.

Thanks to Dave Cody for the additional insights.

[Thanks to Danny Sichel for the story.]

65 thoughts on “Dragon Awards Updates

  1. All the missteps, including the unusual (and changing!) eligibility dates, seem to be more of a consequence of not really thinking things through in the rush to get this together for this year. I really don’t see a need to attribute it to anything more nefarious.

  2. @Hampus

    Note: I was running through the perceived flaws, not necessarily suggesting that those were already being exploited.

    Sure, but I don’t consider it conspiracy speculation as the possibility is built into their (announced) system.

    This was not directly addressed, which suggest to me, further, that whoever is strategizing these awards is either not thinking them through, putting them together in haste and/or both.

    Neither of which puts them in a good light.

    I can hardly think of a time when such things were not eventually exploited in some fashion or other, especially when doing so leads to more money/influence being earned. That’s kind of why rules are put together to minimize those kinds of things from happening.

  3. All the missteps, including the unusual (and changing!) eligibility dates, seem to be more of a consequence of not really thinking things through in the rush to get this together for this year.

    Definitely. Everything about the Dragon Awards thus far seems to suggest that there was a rush to get the award out right now rather than an effort to make sure to do them well. There are so many elements that bespeak of disorganization and lack of foresight.

    The primary problem is that there seems to have been a push to get the awards ready for this year, and as a result, everything has been pushed into the public eye before it was really ready. The website that was (and still is) riddled with errors. The extremely short nominating time. The screwed up eligibility period, and so on. The decision to have the extremely (and probably unachievable) shot turnaround times between the nominating period and the announcement of the finalists and the final vote and the announcement of the winners. The vague (and still emerging) selection process.

    Imagine how much more polished the awards could have been if they had waited until this year’s Dragon*Con to announce the awards for next year’s Dragon*Con. They could have proof-read their website. They could have polished up their presentation. They would have had a nine month nominating period instead of a four month one. And so on. In addition, they could have made the announcement as part of a big unveiling at Dragon*Con. They could have had a big publicity event worked into the con itself to promote the award.

    Basically, by waiting for next year, they could have done so much better than they have thus far.

  4. Why rush things for this year? Hmm. A lot of fumbling steps out the gate here.

    I’ll sit this opportunity to “vote” out, too, but I’ll watch with mild interest, as I’m always interested in awards in a general way, even if some (e.g., Gemmell, Goodreads) interest me less than others (e.g., Hugo, Nebula).

  5. So it sounds like they’re borrowing the Parsec Awards model. Not too surprising, as the Parsecs are given out at Dragon*Con.

    More details at the link, but the TL;DR is: crowdsourced nominations, steering committee plus additional volunteers fill out scoresheets on everything, highest scores become finalists, separate jury selects the winners.

    So… not a fan-voted award at all, and having more nomination votes for a particular work doesn’t have any effect. In fact, the Parsec Awards site includes a function to allow you to see if a work has already been nominated, thus sparing you the trouble of filling out the nomination form.

  6. Kendall: Why rush things for this year?

    Apparently, this is DragonCon’s 30th anniversary. But it still shouldn’t have snuck up on them. They should have starting planning last year or, as Aaron suggested, announce this year that it will begin next year.

  7. @Laura So are they going to allow people to change their nominations since they changed the eligibility period? Right now you can add, but not change.

    Looks like my advice to wait a few months before participating was good advice since they said upfront you can’t change your nominations. 😉

    I’m going to wait for 30 days before nominations close this year before making my nominations. Let them get as many kinks out as possible before nominating something and coming up against “can’t change your nomination” even if we changed the rules. Although they may change that rule if rules affect nominations.

    I expect we’ll see changes next few years as they work the kinks out. It’s not like we aren’t still making changes to the Hugo process.

  8. @Tasha

    I expect we’ll see changes next few years as they work the kinks out. It’s not like we aren’t still making changes to the Hugo process.

    Very true. I wouldn’t know how kinked the Hugos were to begin with. 😉 Hopefully we’ll get some more ironed out of the nomination process with EPH.

    I’m still thinking about participating in the Dragons, but will definitely wait a while yet.

  9. I’m probably going to wait till the last week or so, and use an email address I don’t check very often (but is still legit).

  10. Very true. I wouldn’t know how kinked the Hugos were to begin with.

    The Hugos appear to have been intended as a one-shot award their first year of existence, and they only had seven categories (and only one, Best Novel – was for fiction). They reported only the winners and didn’t list any of the other nominees, and no one now seems to even know if there were other nominees. They skipped the next year, and then in 1955 they came back with six categories – three for fiction and three for non-fiction. In 1956 they expanded the non-fiction categories to six, including Best Features Writer, Best Reviewer, and Most Promising New Author.

    In 1957 the Hugos ditched all of the fiction categories and gave awards in only three total – Best American Professional Magazine, Best British Professional Magazine, and Best Fanzine. In 1958, they went back to having fiction categories, although they only had two of thise, but they added a Dramatic Presentation Category. They also has a #1 Actifan category. In 1959 they started listing the other nominees in the categories. And so on.

    The first several years of the Hugos’ existence they were in a state of constant flux. Things have settled down a bit since then, but categories still come and go, although there are not the wild swings of the early days.

  11. Aaron: The first several years of the Hugos’ existence they were in a state of constant flux. Things have settled down a bit since then, but categories still come and go, although there are not the wild swings of the early days.

    The main difference being, I think, that the Hugos were started as a bit of a lark, and were not something created with the intent of becoming a long-lasting benchmark for genre fiction.

    I don’t think that the intent of the Dragon Awards organizers was to do this as a short-term lark. But with the way it’s been set up and handled so far, it’s kind of hard to tell.

    ETA: Also, the originators of the Hugos didn’t really have any similar awards program to use as a basis for developing their own. It’s not as if the Dragon Awards don’t have plenty of award programs now to use as examples, that they would need to do all this fumbling around in the dark.

  12. JJ & Aaron: When they came up with the idea for the Hugo, the International Fantasy Award, given in the UK, had already existed for a couple of years. What’s even more interesting, the IFA trophy was in the shape of a rocket. However, it was a juried award, and presented at closed invitation-only events. So there may have been a little cross-pollination of ideas at work, though the Hugo was a popularly-selected award presented at a public event.

  13. If I vote at all in the Dragon Con awards I won’t be signing up with one of my usual emails. I’ll either see if I can remember the password to my spam account or just make a new one in gmail for the purpose.

    Given that it appears to be less about what the fans want and more about what the shadowy cabal of “experts” deems worthy, I don’t really want to give details that can be readily linked back to me.

    And experts in what? fraud protection and voting systems? Genre classifications? Wine and cheese pairings? I’m all for being vague but we could use at least a little more information on where these guys are coming from.

  14. Yes, thanks for the Hugos history, Aaron and Mike!

    I imagine any issues with the Hugos were ones that weren’t so obvious beforehand. But who knows? On the other hand, the Dragons had issues I think anyone could spot before they got half-way through reading the initial press release.

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