So I’m actually quite excited to be going to the Times Higher Education Awards, as Southampton have been short-listed for outstanding ICT Initiative for http://data.southampton.ac.uk/. When (OK, if) we win, it’ll give us some great bragging rights. Although I’ve met one of the other ICT short-listed teams, as we’re working with them doing cool stuff with equipment data, so I won’t be too grumpy if they win as they’ve done some neat stuff too.
The problem is, what use are these awards? Check out the “Previous Winners” page from last year – it’s bloody useless. It doesn’t even tell you the names of the projects. This entirely fails to promote good practice in the sector, and it would be so easy to link to the winners (and short-listed) teams entries, or better still to their project sites so we could check them out for ourselves. I want to see what other great things are going on in UK ICT and they are failing to take this simple step.
These awards are like if the Oscars announced only that a “Paramount” movie won the award for best supporting male actor, but didn’t bother to tell anybody who the actor was or what the movie is called. That’s a bit lame.
Win or lose, it’s a missed opportunity for us and the other projects involved.
I’ve got to rent a tuxedo for the first time in my life so that’ll be… novel.
*** UPDATE ***
I’ve heard back from them, and they were (a) good natured about my bloggy-banter and (b) seemed to be willing to consider the issue. I don’t think they are going to change the policy, which is a pity, but if they start to hear this from more angles then maybe in time they’ll work out how they can do it.
Chris… It’s just like realising that google and FB are only interested in demographics and education. Make it good, blog well, record and reveal the real story, you can’t rely on any other bu**ers to do that.
Well done in even getting your point across! Hopefully they’ll take it on board as, as you say, not even listing the project for which the award was won is ridiculous.
Good luck to Southampton anyway! Looks like a great University every time I’ve been there.
Sigh, so we won, but of course their website just says “UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON” — nothing about the winning project or people.
Oh, and while there was some free wine, before hand I bought a couple of drinks in the bar. A beer and a large gin & tonic ran to £18.50. That’s more than I paid for the 2lb steak dinner at the Rockstone!