Re: [AGA Contest] Re: more biotopes

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, S. Hieber wrote:

> How do we qualify judges for any aspects of the contest?

Excellent question.  Here's what *I* use to qualify a judge.  The most
important thing is, CAN THEY AQUASCAPE?  I look at homepages, entries in
previous contests, perticipation on the net, etc.  I don't care if they do
something controversial that some might think sucks, but do they
understand the basics, the tools, and have some sense of design in what
they do?  I also try to balance folks with different backgrounds: Dutch,
Nature Aquarium, etc, if possible.  I actually create an initial list from
winners of THIS contest from which to start bugging people to judge.  
Unfortunately, the list then gets seriously whittled-down because they're
usually entering as well or judged the AB contest and will "never ever
ever do something like this again."  Oh, and in the past we've let people 
judge and enter, but it's a serious pain.  So I try to avoid it right from 
the start.  So we'll probably NEVER get Jeff Senske to judge.

The second factor is, as I mentioned yesterday, how eager *they* are to
judge vs. other people thinking they'd make a good judge. Do they have
some kind of agenda here?  I'm looking at it a bit like panel selection in
Jury Duty....they're being called on by the AGA to serve a judging term.  
So I'm a little leery of "ME ME ME!"

OK, at this point in the process I've got maybe 3 people at best, and I'm
usually freaking out that we won't have a full panel.  So then I e-mail
Karen Randall. :)  OK, seriously, it's become almost a tradition that
Karen ends up on the panel even though everyone else has one term.  

Then I look at this year's speakers at the convention.  I also ask some of
my friends to do a hunt for one or two "famous" people to balance things
out.  I *try* to run the same criteria, i.e. evaluating their credentials
as an aquascaper, but it doesn't always work out in this case.  But I have
to balance the "famousness" with "credentials" and "reliability" for this
one or two judges.  For instance, I had no idea how Ole Pedersen was going
to do as a judge last year, not having access to a computer and going off
on a trip for a month right in the middle.  Or I was a little bit leery
when George and Karla "decided" they'd like to judge separately, thus
counting their scores twice as much as them judging as a team (as *I*
intended).

It is ALWAYS a nail-biter for me to figure out if the judges as a team 
"get" the biotope category.  There's always one who completely spaces out 
and scores it just like the others.  And it's usually the foreign guy who 
I can't really communicate with.  But I think the overall scoring has been 
fair here.

I unfortunately have to sigh when I see posts suggesting judge
qualification based on a rigorous set of standards, and how judges should
be tossed if they don't conform to such and such.  In this contest, we try
to have 5 judges on a panel and we've only managed to have this happen
once or twice in four years.  With a good panel of five, one can have a
rousing controversial battle over whether the all-red tank is brilliant or
"pond scum", and you know it's not just a fluke because one judge thought
it was great.

Karen tells me the same thing happens in the Amano contest, btw.

  - Erik


-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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