Vraiment discussion

Turn dakharris' rhetorical questions into declarative sentences about Vraiment and those would be my reasons for my nomination and vote for Vraiment. If the amount of generation of content by the nominee himself is the main or qualifying factor, then I have no idea how he stacks up against others. I would guess he doesn't publish that much content of his own, as hinted at by dakharris. And yes, I probably didn't read the rules when suggesting his nomination or in voting for him, and didn't realize that encouraging my fellow FOGers to vote was for whatever reason prohibited. FWIW, I never even saw the rules. The entire voting process was rather confusing. Perhaps after tallying the nominations, it would have been good to have a clearly marked, separate thread with the poll and rules as the first post (and if you did that and I didn't really see or follow that, I apologize). If what you were after was the person who published the most substantive content both qualitatively and quantitatively, it might have been better to make that clear.

Many of us only follow certain forums of interest so I have no idea how great the contributions of others might be for many of the forums I don't frequent. I can say, however, that there are several who made the nominations list who did so seemingly on quantity alone, and some of the views I have seen them express might actually want me to vote negatively. Not so with any of Vraiment's posts.

Finally, Rob and other Moderators, please don't take this as any sign of disrespect. I thank you for all the hard work you do having created and maintaining this wonderful online community.

 

Probably we ignored it as just being the title, and not a criterium. I know I did. As dakharris noted, there are many ways to view what it means to be an "ambassador". I thought, "who would I want to be representative of me and my interests," not who published the most amount of quality content, which seems to be the way we were expected to, but did not nominate/vote.

And if the main criteria are quantity and quality of posts, and making for entertaining, informative discussions, I would nominate TheMayor.

 

I hope you're not suggesting that I abused the process in any way. I think that would be an unfair characterization.

 

This is all too comical!! Bull**** if you ask me. The title of Ambassador has been tainted by this and I'm laughing at the process and informal formality. Truthfully, this title means NOTHING!!! What means everything is that Joe Keon has done a tremendous service for FerrariChat, Ferrari, FOG, his friends, charities, etc. If you wanna eliminate him from the competition then go right ahead. It matters not to Joe, FOG, or any of his friends. Whomever is elected can have a little asterisk by their name, in the eyes of F-chatters and in their own mind, knowing they were elected in a rigged and contentions poll. Some of you must get off line, stop thinking so much, go put some miles on your car….. and get real!

 

The next runner up, Terry, spends all of his time here responding almost instantly to technical questions and problems posed by Fchatters with clear, concise and reliable information. Not to take anything at all away from Joe Keon, whoever he is, but all of us here know Terry, recognize him instantly as an invaluable contributor to Ferrarichat. Ferrarichat. That's not bull****. Sounds like FOG needs to create a similar honor, except of course for the rigged, contentious bull**** part and award your friend Joe as the first ever recipient.

 

I think it's the improper usage of the word, "ambassador," that probably is the problem. When I think of an ambassador, I'm thinking that he's representing the interests of a community outside of the community. An ambassador spends very little time in his own community. Maybe another more appropriate title should be considered if that's not the intent?

Yes, you really need to better define the rules. I'm just really puzzled at what this is supposed to be about. I had never heard of stokpro until I started looking into this. Apparently, he really loves his Challenge Stradales and not much more. Steve Magnusson started a grand total of 6 threads in 2012. So I'm pretty confused as to just what the "Ambassador of the Year" is supposed to mean, especially since you allowed Kitty Fishsticks to be on the ballot in 2012. You can imply that some of us have comprehension issues, but the background information and prior results conflict with your stated qualifications and are quite confusing. Your description of the proper candidate is pretty broad:

"In my mind, ambassador doesn't have to be any one thing, user can have contributed in multiple areas or a few. I guess simple question would be who is good for the community overall by their actions and behavior."

I'm just wondering what about Vraiment's behavior, actions and contributions has caused you to want to disqualify him from a poll, rather than let the chips fall. Maybe you need to insert the word, "online," after the word "their" and before "actions."

But it's argued that Vraiment hasn't created a community within F-Chat? But for Vraiment, these threads and communities inside and outside of F-Chat would not exist:

The first one has over 11,300 posts with close to 600,000 clicks. It doesn't matter that he's not the OP. It's Vraiment's thread and I think that the OP would probably agree.

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/california-nevada-northern/252738-official-bay-area-ferrari-owners-group-fog-rally-breakfast.html

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/california-nevada-northern/435956-2014-fog-charity-rally-sf-sb-9-26-9-28-presented-ferrari-silicon-valley.html

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/california-nevada-northern/309539-sacramento-region-exotic-drivers-sacred-group-thread.html

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/california-nevada-northern/401593-official-fog-hat-thread.html

 

Terry is great! I didn't know that he was very active outside of the 458/550/575 community, but I am grateful for his participation there.

Funny you should mention it, but FOG does have such an award. It's a memorial to a highly respected and loved member who passed away two years ago. We honor his memory by honoring someone who exemplifies many of the qualities that I think that Rob intends to honor with this award. Vraiment has not been so honored to date. That may be because he's on the selection committee. Vraiment and a majority of the FOG Board wanted to make the award the result of a popular vote of the membership. I strenuously argued that a fractured membership that spends around 4 hours a month in each other's company has no idea who is deserving of such an honor and it could turn into a popularity contest. So I was able to convince them to make the selection by consensus of the Board. IMO, Rob should just pick who he wants and not leave it up to the whim of users who don't know the individuals. In support, the most deserving recipient, IMO, has been Jedi.

 

I've never hung out in 458 or 55/575. Terry does a lot for the members in 599/612. Sure everyone has the areas they frequent. Point is that a guy like Terry is contributing to the community, this community.

I haven't been around all that long, only noticed this particular aspect of Fchat last year, but I think it's pretty obvious that the problem is the opposite of Rob choosing who he wants. It seems entirely hands off, and could probably use a real set of rules.

Or we can just ruin it for everybody and cancel the whole thing for 2014 because the owner of the board doesn't agree with us.

 

Vraiment, for obvious reasons.

Otherwise, I would like to nominate Matthias Bartz, aka German Dino,
who single handedly wrote and published the best labour of love on Dino,
and dare I say the penultimate bible and reference tome on a single Ferrari model.
This, not to mention, one of the best sources for information on our cars.

Can he be a 'write-in'?

Regards, Alberto

 

I have no additional nominee, but would point out that someone only known regionally is not truly an ambassador of FerrariChat.com, he might be of NORCAL, or MAR, or Florida or whatever, but not of the entire group.

I'd like to add I know of almost all the nominees, but have never heard of vraiment, leeead1, hawkeye and a couple others, and I think I'm a pretty active member here.

D

 

Active with only 23k posts?

I always saw this process as "Ferrarichat" as a whole. There are some people that I only know of from certain sections. RayG in the Fine Watches... thread is a good example. I've never seen him him comment elsewhere.

The person I voted for posts all over the board and is a contributor everywhere. He's also a Ferrari guy with more experience with the cars than many of us will ever have. My $.02. Worth exactly what you paid for it.

 

And last year's winner of the whatever this is award garnered 44 total votes from a membership of approximately 135,000. That's .03% of the community. In other words, this award and the whole thread is statistically insignificant to all but about 200 pre-approved insiders. I don't think that there's any point in continuing to cite cherry-picked statistics in support of a decision for which no explanation or apologies are necessary. You are offering what I consider to be a generous prize....an invitation to live rent free for life in your "house." You can make up any rules, deny it or give it to whomever you like.

 

Geez. Really?

 

What? You don't want to win? I think that the prize is very generous and anyone who receives it is fortunate. BTW, I think that your adventure thread should be thread of the month. Never went to the trouble to look into how that is decided.

 

The problem I see is that the relevance of the contributions to the specified award needs to be judged and voted on by a sufficiently large number of users that a user popular and known primarily in Norcal couldn't win *just* because he is known and popular in Norcal, but because he is also recognized throughout Ferrarichat for the desired qualities.

If we were to put a mod position up for vote, say in the Creative Arts forum hypothetically, we would want the Creative Arts forum users to be the voters. If one of the candidates were from the Midwest and it turned out that a lot of Midwest users that didn't normally frequent Creative Arts dropped by to vote for him, the outcome would not be something that the forum intended. In the same way, a specific region determining who is Ferrarichat Ambassador also isn't something the forum intended.

I don't see a problem with vraiment being nominated, having been kept on through the filtering process, or with any of the points submitted as evidence of his contributions. Being a Norcal-based mod, I was probably most familiar with him and the FOG activities and it would not have occurred to me to object to him during the filtering process, as he has done a lot for local Ferrari owners and the marque, and I would have wanted him to get a chance to be voted on for his contributions as perceived by Ferrarichat users.

Rather than vraiment's nomination, the issue seems to be the relatively low vote participation, such that a few dozen users voting in a concentrated fashion can determine the outcome relative to a couple of hundred users (the 2012 vote was 202 users) who are voting in a more distributed fashion. If the voting participation were high enough that no single interest group would represent more than 1-2% of a winning candidate's vote count, then everyone would feel confident that the winner was judged on a broad base of support rather than a special group's base of support. Unfortunately that's not the participation level we're at in these votes, so the motivations of the voters are suspected as being misaligned with the intended purpose of the award.

There are a few solutions I might propose:

1) The nominees each get 1 vote and must vote for another nominee, not themselves. The winner is the nominee with the most votes. The idea is that if those who are recognized as nominees, recognize amongst themselves someone who is most deserving, that should have validity.

2) Rob appoints a selection committee that votes amongst themselves which of the nominees should get the award. Perhaps the selection committee is composed of Lifetime, Honorary, Consultants and Mods. Alternatively, the selection committee could be all Rossa subscribed users. Both of these groups have arguably demonstrated some level of commitment to Ferrarichat and so are more likely to vote for a valid Ferrarichat Ambassador.

3) If the desire is to keep the vote as broad as possible and as close to the current vote process as possible, my last suggestion is to just make it a public vote, with a clear explanation by Rob of what characteristics he means by Ferrarichat Ambassador. That doesn't prevent Norcal users from voting for vraiment *just* because he's from Norcal, but some transparency may engender a bit more voter integrity.