Neda, Andrew, best wishes and thank you so much for your response. The Awards is something we all put a lot of time and effort in. We love to do the right thing, so let’s see how we can improve next year.
Firstly, I think bundeling our time and strengths is the key to making this work. I don’t think chopping it up in several awards for several continents works in the bigger picture. But I am not sure. What I am sure of is that the entire workload of prepping and running the awards is more than we thought. Might need some help there next time.
We thought that inviting everyone to do the pre selection and the voting, would be a great way to do it. And we still think it is. However, up until now, the majority of the community is mainly from/based in western Europe. So even though we try to create a level playing field, the field itself is populated with many ‘players’ from the EU/UK.
To broaden the entire community we have been working on inviting community managers to help increase the awareness all over the planet, not just EU/UK. If we all help out a bit, and do that succesfully, the total distribution of active people (hunters, artists, general voters) from different continents will be more balanced in the future.
Please let us know if you would be open to talk about how you could help with that. I know @Streetartwerpenaar and @Stef might have some ideas about it.
On the expert panel; selecting a well balanced team of experts that represent multiple continents was high on our list. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get in touch with one ozzie who was on our list. So you are totally right there. Good take away for next time; take more time to invite experts from all the continents. Would that be something you would be open to assist in as well?
Lastly: use the current award show to mobilise as much attention as you can for street art. For finding new enthousiasts, people that might want to help out hunting, new artists or new galleries. See the awards as a mechanism to find more likeminded people. We need everybody for the documentation to work, not just the awards.
Anyway, hope this clears things up a bit. Feel free to reply and use this thread for ideas on how to improve going forward. We are in it for the long haul, as you might already know.