2019 Ditmar Report

This page constitutes the Ditmar Sub-Committee Report for 2019. It is currently a work in progress.

Report

Nomination Process

Nominations were open for a period of 34 days. The "active in fandom" requirement proved confusing

A total of about 500 nominations were received from about 100 people, improved from last year, even if down in total works nominated; the majority (450) came from the online system. We are still down from 2017 and the recent peak of 2015.

Again this year, a few (3) email nominations were received and entered, but there were no postal nominations.

Once again all ballots were processed using the software developed by Peter Lyons. While this has not entirely eliminated manual processing, it has made things much easier. It might prove useful to have these scripts made publicly available via a site such as github.

Voting

Voting was open for 35 days.

The voter turnout steadied in its decline: 46 votes were received, 4 were invalid due to the voters not having the required membership.

No postal or email ballots were received. It should be noted that again, no PDF ballot was created and so no paper ballot was distributed.

Once again, the ballots were processed using the automated system developed by <NAME>.

Summary

The conclusions are very much the same as for the last few reports.

Nominations were only slightly down this year, but there still is a worrying trend. While this is a perennial problem, it is something that needs to be addressed. The voting turnout is a particularly troublesome issue.

One thing of note is that we no longer have a member of the Standing Committee who is a member of the majority of the Australian SF mailing lists. This restricted the dissemination of the call for nominations. Next time, we should attempt to contact the list maintainers earlier and make arrangements for announcements to be posted.

Multiple announcements went out using Twitter, and these seemed to garner some attention. This year, some use was made of Facebook to draw attention to the voting, and this may have been of some help, A more concerted use of social media platforms, such as Facebook is definitely indicated. Next year, Twitter announcements and Facebook postings should both be made in the relevant feeds.

Finally, we would like to thank Jeremy Byrne for providing access to the online systems used for administering the Ditmars.

Eligibility declarations

Peter: "I hereby declare any and all work of mine which might be nominated for the Awards to be ineligible".