[Decision] Post of the Fortnight

[Iskar]

Following our discussion here let us discuss the idea of a regular contest for the best post in more detail and make a recommendation to Hex about it.

Some key points to consider:

• Period: Two weeks or a month. Depending on how it works out with participation and workload. I'd start with two weeks as a months seems a lot already given the frequency at which new topics pop up in the D&D.
• Procedure: The consensus seemed to be a procedure similar to the Picture of the Week or Writing Competitions. The nominations and vote would take place in the D&D accessible by all full members.
• Nominations: Perhaps keep this as open as possible. People can hand in their own posts as well as nominate posts of others.
• Voting: I'd first try a general free vote, but if a sensible set of metrics can be established that could be helpful as well to make awards less of a popularity contest. We can try and come up with a first suggestion for such metrics, but ultimately I think these need to be carried by the D&D denizens to ensure acceptance.
• Commentary: I'd not prohibit commentary entirely but set it up with a couple restrictions in the commentary thread's OP, such as talking about structure, style and argumentative consistency rather than the content of the premises the arguments are built on.
• Finally I'd make it part of the recommendation to ask Hex and integrate it with the plans for the additional subforum and/or repurposing of the Fight Club.

I will start wording an actual recommendation once we have come to a general agreement on keypoints.

---

Since this is more or less finalised, let's give the committee's initiative some positive legitimacy beyond the mere absence of opposition in the Q&S thread.

Decision - Post of the Fortnight

The Curia recommends the installation of a fortnightly award for excellent debate contributions as worked out by now by the dedicated committee:

Rules / procedure:

- Each user can nominate a single message, and the only valid form of nomination is by quoting the chosen post in the PotF thread designated for it.

- There will be two competitions held every month, with a period for nominations followed by a period of voting. The submitted posts can be discussed in a dedicated space.

- Only messages that have not participated in a previous poll and that have been published in the current or previous month in any section of the D&D area may be nominated.

- The authors of the nominated messages will be informed so that they can withdraw the candidacy if that is their wish.

- The maximum number of participating messages in the final vote will be ten. If more than ten nominations are submitted, seconded nominations will take priority. After seconded nominations are considered, earliest nominations will take priority. If the number of messages submitted to the contest is less than ten, the organizing committee may nominate posts if it considers it appropriate. The members of the committee will never nominate a message belonging to one of them, but the rest of the users can nominate their messages (organizers messages).

- Public or private messages asking for a vote for a candidate post are forbidden. Violators (and their posts) may not participate in the running contest.

[Cope]

My initial thoughts:

• Yes to a fortnightly award (every other week).
• No to having free nominations.
• Yes to having a public final vote.
• Yes to allowing public commentary.

The reason that I'm sceptical about free nominations is that I don't like the idea of users nominating their own posts and I suspect that posts will be nominated on the basis of ideology rather than quality. Moreover, I think it will be more difficult to manage from an administrative perspective.

[Katsumoto]

These initial suggestions sound good to me.

The reason that I'm sceptical about free nominations is that I don't like the idea of users nominating their own posts and I suspect that posts will be nominated on the basis of ideology rather than quality. Moreover, I think it will be more difficult to manage from an administrative perspective.

This is true, but what's the alternative? A group of elected citizens nominating posts could be good, but it would be a lot of work for them and it'd be prone to accusations of bias/elitism.

[Cope]

These initial suggestions sound good to me.

This is true, but what's the alternative? A group of elected citizens nominating posts could be good, but it would be a lot of work for them and it'd be prone to accusations of bias/elitism.

I favour a D&D content manager (or two) overseeing the award. Preferably such a person would be a familiar and active user of the D&D. He/she/they would nominate posts for the award and then all users would be given an opportunity to vote. Users would be able to suggest posts for nomination, however.

Going down the public nomination route would create lots more work and leave the D&D spammed with nomination and award threads, just like PotW.

[Love Mountain]

I think we should set a "template" of what an ideal PotF should look like and have the final vote in a space of 2 days. I think the nominations should be shown as they are nominated, that way people can comment and discuss the nomination. Ideally the discussion can be a criticism or promotion of why a certain nomination is excellent or bad, i.e. it doesn't embody the "ideal" PotF post or perhaps there are qualities to the post that other people are missing, etc. I think we should all make efforts to participate in the discussion to emphasize that the winner should be rewarded for "how" an argument or information is made/presented, rather than the subject of the post itself.

[Sir Adrian]

Opposed as long as free public nominations remain a thing and no post discovery prevention method is implemented.

If the purpose of this decision is to reward quality posts then you need to keep the identity of the poster secret and make it so that the posts cannot be found by others for the duration. Otherwise it will simply turn into a popularity contest where people vote the ideology and the poster rather than the post and only divide the mudpit further.


I appreciate the spirit of it but the proposed implementation is self-defeating.

This is true, but what's the alternative? A group of elected citizens nominating posts could be good, but it would be a lot of work for them and it'd be prone to accusations of bias/elitism.

There are plenty of alternatives.

1. submissions are sent via private message and if they clear the initial checks the submitted posts are temporarily moved to a private forum where they are not visible to anyone but the organizer. anybody who has access to said forum cannot vote or submit. anybody who divulges the identity of the poster is premabanned from submitting or entering and banned from the d&d for x amount of time.

2. you already have a whole branch of staff already dealing with competitions, posts and awards. have a chat with the appropriate hex and let them organize it (if hex approves).

[antaeus]

Thinking out loud... There are two types of posters in the D&D. Those who structure arguments well irrespective of the topic, and those who argue from belief which they sometimes structure. The issue is the general populace being able to identify something that is well worded but against their fundamental belief structure. Which I doubt everyone can do. Perhaps we can manage this and work with it, rather than fight it.

Full democratic process is an inefficient way of managing potentially a lot of content, it's also not necessarily the fairest way.

Just spit balling solutions here...

A revolving council or jury of some form made up of actual D&Ders rather than being a part of the Curial or administrative apparatus would encourage ownership and participation by the debaters. The revolving nature would address balance.

There should be a stand down period between jury terms to prevent it being dominated by individuals. The panel should be an odd number (3 would be an ideal number to keep it efficient, but it could stretch to 5 if balance proved an issue). They would need to have some private facility or sub forum to discuss and debate between themselves about the nature of posts being judged without general forum interference. This sub-forum could itself be passively witnessed by the Hex and or someone in the Curial administrative structure for oversight.

The judges would then whittle down the nominated posts.

I'd suggest making it a monthly affair rather than anything more frequent. Because this process would by it's nature require nomination and selection of jurors and posts, and a bit of background reading by the jurors.

The nomination of jurors could be done in a sticky thread, it doesn't even need to be a vote, just simple nominations so we can see who votes for what.

The real question is how do we identify nominated posts without screwing with conversation flow and turning the forum into a mess.. I'd suggest also using a sticky thread that is up for most of the month for people to nominate posts - with no commentary or discussion allowed other than a brief 'why' (like the political profile thread) That way posts can then be assessed by the jurors within the original context. Regular forum moderators can police these threads without much extra effort.

I haven't put a lot of thought in to this so I'll revisit it tomorrow. At a first glance, we'd need some sort of management for conflict of interest for those nominated for post and jury - this could happen a lot, but I think it does address some of the concerns raised.

So in summary...

- A thread nominating the jury to be up for 3 weeks
- A thread nominating posts to be up for 3 weeks

followed by a 1 week period to organise the jury, and for the jury to choose a post through discussions in a private sub forum that they have access to for the week.

- Once a month, the best post is announced and someone gets a pretty badge.

As far as TWC resources go... this would really just need someone to manage juror permissions, the sticky threads and announcements. Over the course of a year potentially dozens of D&D members could serve as jurors alongside people they're politically antagonistic with, working together to identify good posts. Maybe that might also address the polarised nature of the place.

[Flinn]

re-thinking on this, I'm with Settra here: if you make it public, it will always be about popularity (which doesn't mean that it wasn't that good, of course). If it has to be public, better to vote the poster and not the post maybe

sort of poster of the month, no need for polls, just nominations (which counts as votes) on a public thread, maybe two names per participant

if you want the post to be voted, then it has to be private.. but how can you do so? People posts in the D&D because they want to express an opinion, share and spread an idea and so on.. removing the post and waiting days for the vote to finish isn't going to work there, also because most of the discussions are quite heated.

It would be possible, maybe to do a semestral competition on posts: more material to be put forward, the discussion(s) at hand would be less heated or not heated at all and maybe, maybe eh, people would be able to be so relaxed that would focus on how the post is written, rather than who wrote it or the content in itself

[Iskar]

I can see where you guys are coming from with the concerns about popularity contests and political biases, but I think the amount of safeguards suggested would make the award more a cumbersome bureaucratic moloch and less of a short-period honouring of good posts, and resignating to just making it a poster of the month award would rather deepen the rifts and make it a pointless monthly reproduction of the site awards for best debater.

First of all, unlike standalone stories or pictures, debate contributions are inherently tied to the discussion environment they were created in. The brilliance of an argument shows in how it addresses previous ones and how it fuels subsequent ones. You cannot separate it from that. Hence isolating nominated posts anonymously is not going to work if we really want to reward debating (in contrast to rewarding standalone quasi-essays that just happened to be posted in a debate thread).

Secondly, restricting the right to nominate to a few staff or quasi-staff members could hugely impair the acceptance of the award as something given by the D&D crowd to the D&D crowd.
I can see why self-nomination is not desirable, though, so a process for orderly public nominations would be good. Maybe something like
"Post are nominated by the joint suggestion of three debaters."
so you have to find at least two other people that also think a post deserves recognition.
Two or three D&D content managers, appointed by staff or chosen by the D&D crowd, could still organise the process of nomination and voting from the technical side of things, with setting up threads and votes and keeping track of winning posts.

If we want to have any chance of making this less about the poster or political leaning and more about the argumentative quality of the post, we have little choice but to make this about the post specifically and not attach too much bling to a single award either - a medal for having five, ten, fifteen award winning posts like the Picture of the Week medals should be fine and by the long run at least gradually detached from the everyday mudslinging.
A further measure to take could be to restrict nominations to posts that are at least a week old, so for the vote only posts on which tempers have cooled would be considered.

An FAQ with a good set of objective metrics (e.g., logical consistency, argumentative structure, clear and readable language) could also help to establish a basis to judge posts on and one that could at least implicitly be referred to to establish whether criticism/support of a post in the commentary is politically/personally biased or honest - if someone doesn't manage to support their argument for or against a post by any of those metrics it is likely their view is biased. This wouldn't need to be enforced in any way. Just having metrics publicly known and visible would push people in the right direction.

Ideally this could serve to establish a more sportsmanlike atmosphere in the D&D and in time build a catalogue of recognisedly excellent posts on a number of subjects, a kind of D&D anthology.

[Flinn]

all your points are absolutely valid Isky, I'm still really unsure that the D&D is the right environment for such a kind of competition

I suppose that the best solution would be to give it a try and see how it goes, with simple rules

Two or three D&D content managers, appointed by staff

needless to say that everything involving the "staff" has to have the approval from Hex before; in all due honesty I think that this should be managed directly locally, from people elected every once in a while from the actual pool of D&D posters

[Iskar]

all your points are absolutely valid Isky, I'm still really unsure that the D&D is the right environment for such a kind of competition

I know it is not the best place for a competition in general, but I think it is the only place a competition for debating can be credibly held.

I suppose that the best solution would be to give it a try and see how it goes, with simple rules



needless to say that everything involving the "staff" has to have the approval from Hex before; in all due honesty I think that this should be managed directly locally, from people elected every once in a while from the actual pool of D&D posters

Very much agreed. I didn't want to interfere with Hex prerogative on deployment of staffers at all, the thought was more that one could draw from their experience with running awards, and someone chosen by the D&D crowd itself would be better for acceptance anyway. Ideally a debater also active in staff could informally help out with advice in the beginning. (Not wanting to draw inadmissibly on people's already scarce free time, though.)

[Flinn]

I think I'm one of those with the most experience in awards, so if this will move forward I'll gladly give a help in organizing it; most probably the best pattern would be to have one or two staffers who are expert with awards to support and direct the organization of a local committee, composed by regulars of the D&D

[Cope]

I think I'm one of those with the most experience in awards, so if this will move forward I'll gladly give a help in organizing it; most probably the best pattern would be to have one or two staffers who are expert with awards to support and direct the organization of a local committee, composed by regulars of the D&D

Agreed.

[Iskar]

I'll try to sum up what we have so far in a draft for the Decision:

The Curia recommends the Administration to establish a fortnightly award in the D&D honouring great debate contributions. In particular we suggest...

• ... to set up a subforum in the D&D containing vote, nomination, commentary, guideline and hall-of-fame threads.
• ... to let the general membership choose two debaters to oversee the awards.
• ... to introduce a medal for having five, ten and twenty award-winning posts.
• ... to hold a preliminary graphics competition for the design of these medals.
• ... to lend the organising debaters the help of award-experienced members of the administration, where time and other Hex duties allow for it.
• ... to appove of regulations concerning the awards, in particular:
  
  • every post must be jointly nominated by at least three members to be considered.
  • self-nominations are not counted towards these three members and are generally ignored.
  • every post considered for nomination must have been created within the past fortnightly period leading up to the award.
  • any post can only be awarded once.
  • discussing the content rather than the structure of posts in the commentary to the awards is prohibited.
• ... to sticky the guideline thread in the award fora, containing an FAQ and a list of recommended criteria to judge posts upon.
• ... and lastly, to consider using the subforum to be set up also for other purposes currently being discussed, such as the Debate Club or Katsumoto's initiative.
  
  • This may all be subsumed under a repurposing of Garbarsardar's Fight Club

[Katsumoto]

Yeah this seems good to me.

[PikeStance]

Maybe I am missing something, but a debate is a "living thing" that cannot be defined by a singular argument or post.
There is something here though... perhaps a "Debator of the Month" similar to the picture and video competition???
Criticism has been articulated; popularity, votes based on similar ideological stance, but if the potential is to create better posts, it is always better to try than not do anything out of fear.

[Iskar]

Debater of the Month would not be similar to Picture or Video of the Month. The precise analogon to Picture or Video is Post. Hence the intended format of this award.
I know a debate post is always included in its contingent debate context, and that would be why we should not separate posts from their thread before voting.

There are some volatilities in this regarding ideological camps and popularity contests, but I think they are innate to the Mudpit and we cannot do better than to at least try.

[PikeStance]

I am not seeing the point of every two weeks or recognizing single posts. Debates are not a single post. I would do this once a month and see how well members participate.
members can vote for best debater of the month (they can site posts or threads) as evidence. At the end of the month, present the nominated members and vote.

I supposed if you must do a single post, then you don't need to bother with a nomination since accumulated reputations can suit that need.

[Love Mountain]

So, where are we with this?

[Iskar]

The committee is working on a first comprehensive draft for the rules to be discussed by the community.