Monthly Challenges?

I was thinking that we could organize monthly Art, Writing and Music challenges, maybe? It would encourage more activity in the forums and give us all more motivation to work on things. :3

It would go like this: The organizers of each category select a theme, and based on that, the participants submit their content within a deadline. Then, the organizers select the top 5 or 10 works they think were good and put up a poll to let everyone else vote on them. After a suitable voting period, the top 3 works are chosen. The winners gets their works featured on the forum until the next monthly challenge (possibly a section on the main page featuring the participants and a link to their respective works?), also a nice banner that they can place in their signature (I just really like banners, okay??), and maybe some other things... I dunno...what prizes can you give someone in a forum, anyway? xD

Basically, it's just for fun, inspiration and a way to showcase some talented people. :3

I like that idea :3

Prizes... the only thing that comes to mind right now is points, like a Hall of Fame where you get ranked based on your total points.

We can create a spreadsheet containing points in specific categories with everything that is pertinent; physical prizes are a bit harder to facilitate though, haha

We have monthly challenges at my gym. There aren't prizes other than getting to put your name up on the board as having actually filled the challenge. Every month the board is cleared for the new challenge, but for a while everyone who comes in sees that you've at least managed the minimum to get on there.

So, yeah, I think that, if there is a ranking for the challenges, that those rankings are only strongly visible until the next challenge.

Yeah yeah, resetting it between challenges sounds fair. A board for every category also sounds good.

Physical prizes obviously won't be a thing, but the points system sounds good. ^^

We could have a group of global and local moderators for each category to be the organizers and judges.

The categories could be:
-Art
-Writing
-Music
-Photography (should we include this? I imagine it might be difficult to get photos of certain themes)

But before I suggest we move ahead with this idea, I need to make sure there will be a decent amount of participants. I don't want the mods to put their time and energy into it when there will only be three participants (not that we mods don't mind putting our energy into it, it's just that there will probably be a bit of coding involved, making of more subcategories, and the like, and it will be disappointing if there's not enough people on this).

Definitly a good idea

I could be interested in doing the art challenge. I'm not good at drawing - after over 20 years I'm still on the same level as I was when I was around 7, I never seem to improve no matter how much I do it - but it could be fun.

I'm totally down with that idea!
Maybe announce it on facebook/reddit to get more people to contribute?

What about using main categories for the challenges, but then add a "others" category where people can make whatever they want related to the subject? If someone wants to create something with sticks, let them build it... for example Then if anyone wants to do photography they could add it under that category?

Definitely up for the art challenge and I think others would be too! Sounds like a great idea!

Interested, but how about instead of having different challenges for different artforms, why not unify the site in its creative endeavours and have everybody make art based off a single theme? Like 'solitude'', or 'claws', or 'growth' or 'skating', or 'bread', or whatever.

This way, we're all channelling our energies in one direction and will deal with less segmentation within the site. And it would allow for interesting and creative collaborations between (for instance) visual artists and musicians, poets and filmmakers, or really anything else people can do (hulahooping + landscaping + pulling funny faces = ???). No need to categorize: categorization is fundamentally a destructive process, not a constructive one. So is competition.

Celebrate art and the creative mind!

I like Cantors thought.
Up for that

They did this at another forum I was relatively active in a while ago, but it was over a week instead. You had from monday to wednesday to make a signature according to a set theme, post it in the specified thread and from thursday everyone could vote for the one they liked the most. The winner got to choose the theme for next week and had his/her signature in a sticky-post for that week. There were some more rules that I don't really remember but it was really successful and I think we could pull it of here as well!

Cantors idea sounds great and we could do have the submission deadline be three weeks and the last week for voting.

I'm so excited to see this forum get more active

Alright then. So far, we've decided on a challenge based on a theme, and anyone can submit within a deadline, whatever their medium of expression. That's great. :3

However, a few people have expressed that competition might be destructive. In my opinion, some thrive on competition, but I can't ignore the fact that it might not be a good thing either, so I can't decide if the voting system is a good idea or not.

So, yay or nay on the voting system? Any other ideas?

I like the idea of a voting system. I just wonder how that would work.

Well, the initial idea was, the judges would pick the top five entries and a poll would be set up, and everyone on the forum can vote on the poll. The names wouldn't be revealed during voting, and only the winner would be announced in the end.

But this is competition, and as some have expressed that competition would be destructive, I can't think of something better that would encourage everyone to participate in this.

Well, if it's all anonymous and voted-on like you say, I can totally get behind that system, especially if it's all kept friendly and reasonably informal. I've never liked the idea of art being a competition (it defeats art's purpose, I think), but there's no denying that competition is an incredible stimulus for activity.

I instinctively have some reservations with the concept of having judges narrow down the list in the first place, however. Can you go into more detail as to how this process would work?

Here's my argument for removing the 'judges narrow the list down to 5' component of the competition. Take it with the grain of salt (and pinch of sugar, and half-pint of vodka) that you should always take everything I say, ever. Even the preceding sentence, take that with a grain of salt too.
Firstly, removing judges from the process minimizes bias, and allows for the possibility of something phenomenal winning that the judges might have missed.
Secondly, it makes the system run just that much quicker: no need for delays caused by jury deliberation.
Thirdly, it's a much less judgemental approach to art: judges try to pick "the best" art, whereas voters pick their favorite. By removing the concept of "the best" and only dealing with the personal preference of the majority, you tilt the focus of the competition from 'objective quality' to 'subjective quality', which is a far more wholesome and creatively freeing way to view art. I'm willing to discuss this point with anybody who cares, incidentally.
Finally, it encourages (almost forces) all voters to view the whole range of art created by all the members, instead of only the judge-picked five (I, for one, am a lazy animal and would probably only view the top five if given that option).

CantorsCantor Qoute:

Just to Clarify and V is free to correct me if I miss state any of this, In order to Avoid Bias I do believe the judges will be restricted from entering that week, also when V says " Best " it is meant to imply the individual ( and then collective ) favourite of the judges

Insanity_Thorn wrote:

In order to Avoid Bias I do believe the judges will be restricted from entering that week, also when V says " Best " it is meant to imply the individual ( and then collective ) favourite of the judges

Yeah, any judging process in which judges are required to judge their own work is necessarily a disfunctional system. Regardless, the presence of judges to thin down the voting crop introduces bias, both in the conventional and statistical (I think it's statistical?) sense of the word. Either the judges are trying to pick 'the best' art (which is generally what judges try to do), in which case their ability to pick 'the best' would be hampered by bias and personal preference, or they're trying to pick their favorite, in which case they are no different from the voting majority and simply have much more control over the outcome of the competition than an average voter. Call me an artistic populist if you will, but I think that everybody should have equal control over who 'wins'.