Great idea to be able to share our opinions here.

Not sure if you want suggestion or not, but here is one. Nominations made by others not only cause duplication, but can be quite random. If a series of images is presented then occasionally one may get selected by a random person or friend because they happen to see it, but it is not necessarily the best of the series either.

Perhaps if artists could propose one image a month from their own collection for consideration by the art council we might stop duplications as well as make people be very considerate about which image they propose. The AC still has the task of maintaining quality by voting on the images proposed and mods can mop up ones that they feel might have been left out.

I like to agree, to a certain extent, with Chris.
Only members of the art council can, in a limited form, nominate photos for the permanent collections. Then all art council members decide, by voting, whether an entry will be transfered to the permanent collections or not. A member of the art council however, is not obliged to judge all the, on Caedes done, submissions on its merits. The danger therefore exists that certain entries, so perhaps good ones as well, are not nominated, simply because they are not viewed. This arbitrariness could be overcome somewhat by following, to some extent, the by Chris done suggestions. Arbitrariness however is further facilitated because an art council member can only nominate two entries per week. If more submissions in that period are worth to be nominated, the "remaining" entries will not still be nominated after the week is over. The limit of two therefore is somewhat arbitrary to me.

Cornelius

"The limit of two therefore is somewhat arbitrary to me."

Not necessarily true, Cornelius.

As you may find out, in light of the 'successes' of your nominations and votes cast/promoted images.

A suggestions have been called for in another thread THIS is mine

Generally, before I nominate an image to the AC I will downlaod the image I'm considering to nominate & place it on my desktop for 3 - 4 days. This way it gives me a better feel of how it will work as a desktop not just for myself but for visitors searching for a desktop. Subject doesn't play a part in my decisions. Sometimes I may nominate it & sometimes not.

Personally I only nominate 1 or 2 images in a 3 week time span to be considered & voted on by the AC.

Could the limit in nominations per week be lowered to one (1) from two (2). This way (perhaps) nominating members will take more time in considering images they wish to nominate. The reason being is I've been getting several very similar images to vote on for promotion to the Main Galleries. Some are by the same artists ... others are not, but are similar in subject. It's not only Landscapes.

I truly believe members need to be much more selective in their nominations.

So, in conclusion my suggestion would be to lower the limit of nominations per week to one (1) in hopes that members would be much for selective in their nominations.

It may also slow down the process in which near duplicate or similar images being promoted to the Main Galleries. Variety is the word I'm looking for & I for one would like to see a bit more variety in the promoted images as it stands now.

I also checked out LynEve's suggestion & it sounds very good & reasonable to me as well.

Just some food for thought.

There are lots of good suggestions regarding the AC; lowering the number of nominations is one of them, Danika. Unfortunately almost all of them require changes to the coding of the site, which I want to avoid, one (and mainly) becuase it probably won't happen, and two, if it doesn't work out, it means more changes to the coding are required to change it back, or to try other ideas. I think this is one of the reasons Geri is often reluctant to do so (ie he changes the coding becuase people are complaining about the current system, then even more people complain about the new one).

Ideally I want to figure out a way we can improve the AC without having to make any changes at all to the coding. The only way I know of that we could do this would be for the mods to maunally edit the selections that the AC makes after the fact. This is something that Geri has asked us not to do, however perhaps if we can show there is a concensus (and I beleive this poll shows that there is), and give a clear definition of the changes we intend to make, he may give approval for such changes to take place. Wait and see...

Introduce a delay (time frame of two weeks) before images are eligible for nomination.

I know.. coding change and an aside from the discussion at hand. My apologies.


Just trying to think of a way or ways of slowing things down.

Something about the immediacy of how things are currently being conducted.. cheapens the entire process in my feeble mind.

As I've created stuff and at the moment, thought it was the proverbial 'all that and a bag of chips'.. then, as little time passing as the next day ... woke up and thought, 'what.. was I thinking..'.

And for the record, I voted "No, there need to be major changes".

Not.. an elimination of the Art Council.

/\ Same here.

I actually love the idea of a member run process that eliminates the need for me and one or two others to troll through thousands of images and manually move the worthy ones to the mains. Just don't think it's working well enough at the moment.

If no one goes through the images systematically there will always be good ones that get overlooked. Maybe we just need more mods.

Well I think that the idea was that AC is supposed to replace a lot of what the image mods do. The issue with promoting more mods is that people eventually run out of steam, lose interest and move on; since the AC automatically includes new people continuously it would, in theory, avoid the issue of new mods having to be selected all the time.

When's the last time a new mod was selected? I don't see anyone on the list who came later than 2006, and most were here well before that. Surely every 5 years is not too often to prune and replenish the list?

Care to offer up some names that you feel might fit the bill, Hannah?

Bearing in mind, these words;

"How to Give a good review. - Hopefully this will give you a good idea of what the caedes.net staff considers to be a good review. It also highlight characteristics that we look for when selecting new staff members."

The pickings get very slim, when taking into consideration any type of constructive critiquing, would you not agree?

If you reduce the number of allowable nominations to one a week, we have no way of remembering when we last nominated something unless we write down the time and date. After giving two nominations, you can't see what has or has not been nominated at all. For that reason alone, I never nominate more than one image in a 7 day period.

Maybe, if we were allowed more nominations in a time period and others could also nominate the same image, those images that receive more than one nomination could be put forward for voting on by the AC. We might get more variety and consensus that way.

As for nominating for mod status only those who give good reviews, I don't currently see that more than one mod gives any reviews, at least not on most of the images I view.

Doesn't change what *caedes (and his own words quoted above) looks for when considering promoting members.


Doesn't change what I said.. about the pickings being very slim when taking into consideration the constructive critiquing aspect.

Which.. is practically non-existent from the images and their respective commentary pages that I have viewed.


Again..

"The pickings get very slim, when taking into consideration any type of constructive critiquing, would you not agree?"

"We might get more variety.."

Soooo.. you don't think/feel/believe that with the current process and system in place ... there is enough variety?

I.. agree.

I don't know why "constructive critiquing" needs to be a consideration, other than as verbal evidence of the person's taste (there's probably a better word but I can't think of it right now). That's not a responsibility of the mods. And it takes a lot longer to critique a piece than to decide if it's Main Gallery material or not. I'd be quite happy to have mods evaluating my work who rarely critique.

Constructive critiquing/critical creative analysis skills.. would be a consideration because:

"The Praetor assembly is primarily in charge of the artistic and cultural development of the society and in the maintenance of its art galleries."


"I'd be quite happy to have mods evaluating my work who rarely critique."

If only there were more than 24 hours in a day..

So if there are mods who were promoted for their critiquing skills, why are you the only one that does? And are you saying that aside from the mods, no one else is capable of making a good critique?

My point is that critiquing doesn't need to be a requirement for considering someone as a mod. A good gallery or good AC choices would be just as useful an indication.
Or if you think it's that important maybe anyone put forward could just offer, say, 5 critiques as a sort of exam. But I think the best use of the mods' 24 hours would be to go through the images. Because anyone can critique, but not many of us can do much about the Main Galleries.

Short answers:

There are other things and aspects to the site that are attended to, and time is indeed in short supply.

For.. anyone, mod and member alike.

And you may have missed a number of other critiques by other mods, if you do not go back and revisit images after having commented. They.. are there.


Points duly noted, Hannah.

Was merely elaborating, offering up an explanation to your first inquiry.

I revisited 144 images starting on page 10 of new images, 36 per page. I found 5 mod critiques such as
1) "pretty cool".
2) "Caught my attention.
Nice shot."
3)"Pretty cool.work bigger and shrink down might reduce image tearing lit it did", and then
4) one paragraph suggesting a different crop and
5) "Lovely scene. It would be nice to see a bit more detail in some of the trees, I'm not sure if it's to do with the contrast but the leaves on some are blended together into a single mass. This sort of thing seems to happen to me when the sunlight is very bright, especially around midday; it tends to "wash out" the detail. Still, everybody else seems to like it, so what do I know!"

Seems to me that many of us are well qualified to give this sort of critique.

Thanks for your input.

I think the AC needs some changes, but I don't want to see full control of the choice of images for the Main Gallery going back to just the mods. I think the mods should just weed out multiples and very similar images for variety's sake.

Seems to me that many of us are well qualified to give this sort of critique.
if thats the case then why do so many of us leave feel good comments rather then constuctive advice?

Why not ask the people who leave the feel good comments then?

I changed my vote from 'there needs to be major changes' to 'leave things exactly as they are'. A drastic move on my part? ... absolutely not. During my observation in the last few months the images that were promoted by the AC to the Main Galleries are ones that should be placed there (with honor of course). I haven't seen alot of sameness in promoted images lately & nominations have slowed down considerably as currently I will have anywhere's from 5 - 10 images to vote on in a given week. Before I would have at least 10 + images in a given day. This tells me members are giving much more thought before nominating an image to be considered for the Main Galleries & voted on by the AC.

Just my honest observation & opinion. Leave things the same ... as is. To me the current AC system is working rather nicely.

Just so everyone is on the same page, with respect to the variety appearing in the Main Galleries..

The Praetors have been promoting imagery as well, in conjunction with those promoted by the Art Council alone.

For a couple of reasons.. and most notably, to provide some counterbalance on the note of 'sameness' of imagery being promoted by the Art Council.


At least, that is the perception held by some of us and on this side of the administrative fence.

That said..

Yes, some good good images are being promoted by the Art Council.