When: Wednesday August 15, 2007 from 6pm
Where: The Velvet Lounge, Mt Lawley
Cost: nothing, nada, zip

So what is a WebJam? It’s your chance to get up and show what you’ve been working on. You get 3 minutes and at the end of the night, the presentation that is voted as the coolest wins some prizes.

Video from previous WebJams is up on Viddler and it looks like a barrel of laughs. More information is coming soon so check out the AWIA web site.

Coincidentally, WebJam Perth will be held in the same week as the WA Web Awards. We’re calling it WA Web Week!

Posted from kay lives here

WebJam Perth

With a moderate amount of fanfare, the finalists were announced on the WAWA web site earlier today.

I’m quite chuffed to see two sites that I project-managed while working at PerthWeb are included amongst the finalists – the Curtin Student Guild and the WA Local Government Superannuation Plan. I’m also pleased to see Jon Yau’s news2.com.au included in the media category – that’s one seriously cool Australian slice of web 2.0, and it doesn’t even have a silly name, logo or any blinding colours like others in the genre.
Tickets to the awards dinner sold out quite a while ago, and I’m looking forward to an excellent night.

Posted from kay lives here

WA Web Awards Finalists Announced

Exciting, huh? I wish I had something cool to enter, but this year, I’ll be part of the organising team only.

Last year we had a cocktail awards presentation evening – but this year we’re going all out with a 3 course dinner, at the Parmelia Hilton again. Last year was fun – complete with the awards chairperson accidentally setting a colleague on fire – and this year should be even better.

The 2006 awards judges are again mostly from interstate. Sonja Bernhardt will be back with us, as will Matt Voerman, the only local on the panel. Joining them are John Allsopp, Cameron Adams, and a “mystery judge” who is still to be announced. The judging process, overseen by Megs Carpenter, is a long and arduous process, and our judges are volunteers who only do it for the love, adoration and an awards night junket to Perth. So immense thanks are due to them in advance for the hard job they have ahead of them.

Thanks are also due to our sponsors, without whom the whole thing wouldn’t be possible. So far we have WebCentral, Bright Telecommunications and Perth IX as Gold level sponsors, Edith Cowan University as Silver level, and Central TAFE, Crumpler Bags, and Sitepoint as Bronze level.

Judging criteria, category list and entry forms are on the official web site now.

Posted from kay lives here

WA Web Awards 2006 – entries now open

The Singing Bridges Travel Diary won. Interesting site.

More interesting to me, however, is that the organisers – SmartyHost, who used the competition to market their blog hosting services – have come under some fire for their judging system. According to a journalist at The Age, who was on the panel, the various judges seem to be marking the entries on different criteria, and no standardization of the scores was attempted. Apparently the winning entry was voted first by only two of the judges, and

“It took the prize only because one of the judges gave it a total of 40 points – by far the most generous award by any judge – and the other 35 points.”

The judges (the report does not state how many there were) only saw the 11 finalist entries. It sounds like not a lot of thought went into the exact scoring process.

This is something that we were very conscious of when organising the WA Web Awards. The WAWAs were organised by the committee of Port 80, and naturally almost all of the committee members, as active participants in their local industry, wanted to enter their own client sites. In order to maintain legitimacy and avoid any hint of bias, a very strict judging process had to be set up.

Firstly, one committee member was designated the judging chairperson. That person was not permitted to enter any sites themselves. Our judging chairperson was the only individual dealing with the judges and entry process. Of course, that meant a lot of work for that one person – Megs did an awesome job – but ensured that no one could even accidentally unfairly influence the judges. We’ll get you an assistant next year, Megs!

Secondly, a very detailed set of judging criteria were developed, customised for each of the 14 categories, with guidelines for what constituted good and bad scores for each. The four judges all commented on the fairness and quality of the criteria – which was very reassuring. Our tireless judging chairperson averaged the scores and determined the winners using a mathematical process – and in fact she was the only person who knew the winners ahead of time, even the judges did not know (although they could probably have made some educated guesses).

In the end each of the winning sites was very deserving (especially the ecommerce category, smirk) and there was no sniping or general disagreement with the results that I heard about. So I guess our system was successful.

I’ll be interested to see how the Best Blog Competition evolves… presumably they will learn from their mistakes and take it to bigger and better things in the future. For me, it’s reinforced just how important a good judging process is to the perceived legitimacy of a competition – the last thing anyone wants is to receive commendation in a competition that then has it’s validity questioned.

Posted from kay lives here

How (not) to hold an awards program