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First full day of reviews |
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October 17, 2003
World Summit Awards Jury, Dubai:
First full day of reviews
Today was our first day getting down to the hard work of reviewing over 600 submissions from more than 120 countries: recommendations of the best digital content in eight different categories. Peter Bruck of Austria (pictured right) spent the morning reviewing for us the nature of the process, and the importance of focusing on projects that are contributing original, innovative content to the information society.
There are 36 of us on the jury, each of us from a different country, ranging from Argentina to Armenia, from Bahrain to Bangladesh. It's truly an extraordinary group of people, and I feel privledged to be a part of it.
Essentially, what we're doing is dividing ourselves into teams of four or five people, each group selected for geographic and gender diversity. We then tackle all the products submitted in one of the categories. In my case I'm reviewing e-science projects. The awards organizers have created a handy online database for us to submit our reviews, with criteria in six categories, each ranging with a scale from one to six. We'll use this method for weeding out the weakest projects from each category, hopefully narrowing it down to the top 15-20 projects, usually out of a group of 60 to 100 projects for each category. Our group is then assigned another subject area, and review the quarterfinalists, reducing the number down to maybe eight or 10. At that point, the group gathers in a plenary session, and we'll discuss each project one by one, arguing the merits of each, until we can select the top five best projects in each category, along with the best projects representative of each world region. And somehow we'll have to get this done by tuesday.
We've been working for about 13 hours today so far, and probably will go until 10 or 11pm local time, repeating the process each day. Our goal is for each group to finish their work on their first subject area by 4pm Saturday. We'll then break to attend the grand opening of Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai's new e-learning center. Rumor has it that the Emir himself will be in attendance, but we'll have to wait and see. -ac
ps- I had to skip a bit of blogging for my remaining time in Oman, plus my flight back to Dubai, but we've been busy. Now that I've got blazingly fast broadband Internet access here in Dubai Internet City, hopefully I'll get a chance to blog it all out during one of our coffee breaks. -ac
Posted by acarvin at October 17, 2003 1:44 PM
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