Its time for another update on Exemplar Happenings. Pull up a chair and sit for a spell.

Updates on Wave 3

First, let’s take a glimpse on what’s happening with Wave 3.  We have completed an initial pass on the recognitions, and are now adjudicating the ones that were disputed.  This means contacting authors of the recognitions that didn’t quite meet the guidelines previously established and asking them to make a revision.  I had originally thought this would take about 2 weeks, however, there are more disputed recognitions than initially anticipated, and each dispute is taking longer to resolve, so the whole process is taking a bit longer than expected.  You can help speed this along by responding quickly to any emails you get from an Exemplar team member.

Exemplar Wave 4

Wave 4 is open for business as of this morning.  This will be the first wave on the ‘mostly’ normal schedule.  The goal is to have 3 Exemplar waves a year; that means each wave will end 4 months after the previous.  If we keep to that schedule, that will put Wave 4 ending on New Years Eve, and nobody wants that.  So, we will be shifting the end date by 2 weeks, and then the next waves end by 2 weeks, and we will be on a Jan, May, Sept schedule from then on out.  Nice, simple, and consistent and predictable.

The deadline for submissions for this wave with be January 17th at 23:59 PST

Note, the end time is based on the Pacific Time zone.  This brings the wave close times in line with event applications, HoF ballots, and conference applications. Now you no longer have to pay attention to the time, just the day.  Unless you live in Hawaii.  Sorry Hawaii.

One piece of feedback we received was that judges wanted to start making nominations earlier.  The team discussed this, and saw no reason not to start as soon as possible.  What this means in the future is that the next wave will be starting 2-3 weeks after the previous wave ends.

This also means posting the recognitions from the previous wave during the current wave.

For wave 3, we altered the slots slightly for L3 Judges and added an addition slot for L2s to recognize L1s.  We received a fair amount of feedback on these changes, and looked at the preliminary numbers to see if the slot changes were doing what we wanted them to do. The verdict was …’not enough data’.   At its core, Wave 3 had too many irregularities to answer the questions we were hoping to.  To that end, there will be no changes to the slots for Wave 4.

Recognizing Judge’s Level	Max L1 Recognitions	Max L2 Recognitions	Max L3+ Recognitions	Additional “any level” Recognitions
Level 2	2			1
Level 3	3	2	2	1
Level 4		4	5	2
Level 5		4	6	2
RC Extra	6	6	1

Before you rush out to put in those recognitions you couldn’t fit into Wave 3, I want to remind people of two items:

– Jack Doyle’s article highlights some examples of good recognitions from the previous waves, and also outlines some of the common pitfalls that people encountered in writing them. This provides some good advice for writing meaningful recognitions which also meet the necessary criteria to be accepted. Following these guidelines will help prevent your recognitions from being disputed and will allow the process to go that much faster.

– The level of the Judge is checked at the time you write the recognition.  This means that if you are planning on writing a recognition for an L1 that you feel might make L2 in another month or so, do it sooner than later.

Closing

Its been pretty cool reading over some of the awesome things we do as a community, and the depth at which we can impact others.  We have plans to highlight some of those exemplary Exemplars in the future, as well as get some feedback from the Judge community on how they feel things are going.

Until then, keep an eye on this space for updates on all things Exemplary.