SND judging

Photo / Feb. 5, 2011

Helping judge the annual SND awards was one of the most awesome things I’ve done in my professional life, despite the fact that it’s done in a 1970s-era golf course club house in Syracuse.

This is a bad photo, but it sums up the actual judging process pretty well. Entries are laid out on tables with a pair of plastic cups. Each judge has a set of single-color bingo chips and walks around voting for each entry – blue cup for “yes”, red cup for “no”. If three of the five judges on the team vote yes then it gets an Award of Excellence. Four or five yeses and it’s held for a later medal discussion.

There were 21 judges and more than 10,500 entries that needed judgin’. It was epic.