Vloggies :: Non-hierarchical Awards Event :: Oxymoronic? Maybe Not

The Vloggies are coming. Yeah. We told you about it way back on July 22.

What's new is PodTech.net is actively moving forward with planning in the person of GET.tv's Irina Slutsky.

Make the Vloggies open source!

Looking at the rough draft Vloggie site, I have questions:

Where are the tired, the transgendered, the poor? Where, the means to handle non-english-speakers? Should Ze Frank (whom I adore) be allowed to compete? He's not an active (or inactive) part of the vlog community. Who decides? What is the bottom line purpose of these awards? To bring attention to PodTech and/or the Vlogosphere?

Oh shit. There are ZILLIONS of questions. Most unanswerable in an open source way.

How in Vlog's name do you structure a non-hierarchical awards event?

I'll tell you how: turn the process on its head.

Don't bother naming categories in advance. In a wine-and-beer-and-coffee-drinking creative marathon for bunches of volunteer vloggers distributed world-wide, invent categories in response to entries.

The awards ceremony becomes a similarly marathon effort. Entries / award winners find their place on the schedule by means of a lottery.

Everybody who enters, attends or wants to attend is awarded a prize. First come, first serve, up to X number of entries. Say you limit entries to 500. At 4 minutes each (3 minutes for vlog, 1 minute for acceptance speech) that's 33 hours. Three days @ 10 hours a day. It's just math.

Award-related questions I like are those having to do with what our community values:

1. What adds value to the community?
   
2. What adds value to the world?
   
3. What is vlogucation?
4. What tools have made it easier for non-geeks to vlog?
5. Who and what are most inclusive?
6. What's lo-fi?
   

These are the ideas I want represented on the green carpet.

Honor the folks who best represent vloggy ideas with face-time on stage.

Someone will eventually DO the hierarchical vloggie event. Dear Vlog, let it not be the open source Vlogosphere that creates or endorses it.

Check out the Yahoo-groups List discussion.

Tags: Faux Press Movlog Vloggies