OUSFG Award Origins

This is the historical discussion which lead to the establishment of the OUSFG Award.

The idea of an OUSFG Award has been mooted, as a way to stimulate discussion and reading of current sf. And possibly to encourage more freshers to join.

See:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/ousfg/10223.html

and

http://www.livejournal.com/community/ousfg/10357.html

Discuss!

I'd just suggest that having the very first meeting of Michaelmas term being the discussion of an on-going annual project may not encourage freshers to join but may instead seem rather intimidating. --MF

• Dave raised the same point on OUSFG Chat. My response:

"On the other hand, they can immediately nominate their favourite books to go on the shortlist, (the longlist is going to be very long, basically consisting of 'everything'; its main use is meant to be to put ideas in peoples' heads), and you can have a (hopefully) dynamic and relevant discussion about that nominations process, instead.

"I favour the October-October schedule, at least to start with, because I favour a small-scale, OUSFG-only award, at least to start with. I'm throwing the July-July out there as another option mostly because it has the big advantage of being able to tie the schedule in with Pico Con.

"(The disadvantage of the October-October schedule is that it does run the risk of clashing with peoples' exams. With a July-July schedule, that's not an issue - all the reading and voting is out of the way by february.)"

• I'd add to that that if there's an issue of sfinx out, we can put a piece about the award in, saying 'here are the books we've been looking at, but not shortlist has been decided yet - what have we missed? Come and tell us!' Come to that, you could put it on the back of the flyer... -- NH