Right, so I have been away for a few weeks and accordingly we seem to have lost a bit of steam on the Slugger Awards front. Now I’d like to inject a little bit of energy into it. But first let me recap on what we’re doing and why we are doing it in this slightly convoluted way.
The bugbear of any awards process is how you decide who is the best MLA, the best political journalist, or in fact the best anything, when there are always going to be different (often conflicting) ways of serving the interests of your society/community/market well.
In politics, for instance, those most closely connected to their constituents (the ‘pot hole fillers’ to paraphrase Mike Nesbitt) are vital to maintaining the democratic bond between the political class and the ordinary folk who vote for them.
But there is also a need to for individuals to articulate wider concerns about infrastructure, education and the economy that can give rise to effective collective action across a single polity.
So (in the first place) we are looking to you to provide us with a pitch for an award category which highlights (and seeks to reward) an individual ‘political virtue’. These will then be short listed by voting at the Delib page and will then be workshopped and finalised at the Belfast Political Innovation event on 20th November.
Only after that date will we have two or three awards in each category (Media, Politics and Civil Society) and at that stage we’ll finally open the conventional nomination/voting process in which we ask you to. We may even fire in the odd ringer category just to keep it interesting and sparky.
As you can see from the banner currently on the top right of the main page, voting is already open for the media award pitches (you can even add some of your own) on our pitches voting page. Now we need you to bring us as many pitches for our politics categories as we can before moving (swiftly) on the civil society award categories.
So, first steps first. Send us 100 words outlining your award category for politics to [email protected] and we will host it here on Slugger. Here’s the original (unmoderated) politics thread for ideas.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty