Monday, March 2, 2009

Competition closed

The Istoria Timor competition is now closed!

We have received 10 entries and official judging will commence shortly. We're having a coordination meeting this Saturday to work out how the judging is going to work and
generally discuss the project.

The way I hope to judge the project is by putting out a call for judges among the universities and high schools. They will submit a form with their name, age, gender, contact details and 100 words on why they should be a judge. The writers will then pick 10-20 to read all of the stories. We'll give them a month or so to read all of the entries and then take their judgments as final. Of course, these are all my ideas, I'm going to put them to the writers and see what they think.

As Shelley and I are leaving Timor in December, I want this project to be as sustainable as possible. So I'm in no particular hurry to decide on a winner. I want to create a community of writers that could potentially run this competition next year, so I'm going to take it slow and try to get as much of this done by the authors themselves. Conservatively, we should have a winner by late May/early June.

I'll then shop the winner (and possibly the runner up) around to all of the local NGOs to see if we can find someone to print it. The quote we have from a local printing company is that it was cost around $8000 to edit, and then print 5000 copies of the book including layout.

Exciting times.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Maun John,

It's a very good idea to invlove students from high schools and universities.
I hope that we as Timorese can make the same project in the days to come..You and Shelley have done a very good project, and this project will be a step for the same project run by Timorese in the days to come..

Good work

Marciano

Unknown said...

Hey John,
one place to look for judges would be newspaper editors. I'd suggest Carlos de Jesus or Mouzinho Lopes de Araujo at the Timor Post, or Otelio Ote at Dili Weekly. Good luck with this!
Jody McPhillips

mr_john said...

Hey Jody,

All good ideas, I'll suggest them to the writers.

Thanks,

John