The Oman Web Awards 2006(?) was held on Friday the 16th of Feb 2007, we expected it to be just like the first OWA, a total scam, so we decided not to participate… but instead of just bitching about it, I decided to do something this time.
As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them – and so I did. When I heard the event was going to run again I decided to participate as a judge. I wrote a little letter pimping myself saying that I am the best judge they could ever have and that I’m looking forward to help out with this event. I sent it by fax, followed up after a couple of days with a phone call and they said that it’s cool and that I’m in.
The deadline for making all the submissions passed without me hearing from them again, so I called up asking about what happened, and they told me that the judgement process is going to be divided into two stages, the initial jury decides the scores and then another group must validate those scores. They put me in the validation team, which I thought was great because I was going to have the final say as the validation is the final level in the decision making process.
A week before the awards I got a call from ABS telling me that I was going to get the scores to be validated sent by fax now and that the instructions on how to carry the validation process will be sent by email. I got the scores of three of the jury members for all the websites they judged. It was a very long list of websites with numbers next to them. I’ll quote to you the relevant part of the email I got:
The validation process is as follows.
1. We have sent the hard copies of the evaluation duly signed by juries
2. Once you receive it please log on to http://www.absoman.com/owaeval/
3. Please log in to each Jury’s account with the login information which has already been sent to you in my previous mail.
4. Compare the online marks with the hard copies and verify that both the entries are the same.Incase of any change in the scores, please make a note of that, and you can consider the marks on the hard copies as the valid score as it is duly signed and approved by the juries.
5. After the validations are done kindly fax back the copies to us on 24499628.
This process is to ensure that a non biased evaluation has been taken place in the Oman Web Awards 2006.
OK, you might not have gotten it, all what the validators are supposed to do is: Compare the online marks with the hard copies and verify that both the entries are the same. I did not get it instantly, I read it a couple of times before I realised that I am going to guarantee non-bias by making sure that a print out of the scores is the same as the one on the screen. I called up asking about what I’m supposed to do exactly, the woman on the phone told me, “Sir, you have to check your email, click on the link, log-in using the usernames you got, and validate that the scores on the screen are the same as those on the paper…”.
My instant reaction was: WTF?! But I didn’t tell her so, I politely hung up. I checked the scores of the validators, the first and second sets were by two Indians, while the majority of the websites were bilingual at least, or completely in English, a significant number still were in Arabic, I did not understand how someone who does not speak Arabic could ever play the role of a jury to rate websites that had no English content.
The third set of scores I got was the funniest, the fax had “Nawras” written all over the letter’s heading. The third jury member was an employee at Nawras, which was also a contestant, I quickly checked to see the score Nawras got on that sheet, of course it was a perfect score. Damn. This employee of Nawras was also the event’s host, Nawras’s representative that received their trophy, and a member of the jury. How crazy is that?
The judgement process for the Oman Web Awards was nothing unexpected, a very shallow exercise by random people that had no apparent qualification, I have a big part of the scores, some were unbelievable biased (Indian judge gives Indian sites better scores), some were totally insane (websites using the same forum software were getting different scores in the technology category?), some were totally irrelevant (nicest websites got the highest score in the interactivity criteria when they had no interactive content), and so much other crap. I cannot believe that I was supposed to a validator and I had no right to validate any of these scores.
I could not imagine myself being part of this joke, I instantly open up my word processor and wrote a letter saying that I cannot be part of this because it is not what I expected it to be, (Did they REALLY want me to check that the scores on the screen are the same as those on the paper?!), I said that I do not know how this could ever guarantee any transparency. And that’s how the letter ended, Transparency, full stop.
The Oman Web Awards does not reward design, arts, or creativity. It is a business event for corporates to add another award to their wall of trophies, and another reason for Khimji, Lexus Oman, and Nawras to make a new press release. It is a shame that many little website owners thought that this was a real proper awards, paid money to join, and then got nothing in return (not that the bigger winners got anything in return anyway).
I cannot think of how this could ever be a meaningful competition when it is totally based on the wrong concept, if you want to celebrate design, arts, and creativity, you reward the DESIGNER, not the owner that did nothing but pay the money. The judgement process should be open to the public, making random people you call judges give out scores on their own in their little offices is wrong, nobody knows on what basis these people give out their scores, the jury should be able to meet up and discuss their scores, say why someone deserved to win and why others lost. And yeah, maybe you should check that the judges are not participating in the competition before asking them to decide who wins.
