How to Select Fellows?

In this presentation, the jury in charge of the selection of candidates for the new fellowship program »Digital Journalism/Web Development/Web Design« at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2015 explain the selection process. The call was held for the first time. A total of 24 months was awarded to four fellows for 2016. The program will be continued with another open call with the same scope in 2017 and 2018.

Why do we reveal the jury process?

It was the first time that fellows were selected by a jury with more than just one person as done in the previous 25 years. Normally, a main juror selects all the other jury members, who then decide independently. Because of this new process and because we live at the crossover between digital and time-based media – where our friends, followers, and communities like (and demand) transparency – we wanted to share and discuss our thoughts during and after the selection process.

So as everything was new and therefore experimental, we carefully wrote down all steps we took and all decisions we made in order to do an analysis of the whole process, which is important for Akademie Schloss Solitude, for us, and for the next selection round for fellowships in 2016 and 2017.

1. Parameters of selection

The first thing the jurors did was to agree on the parameters of selection.

What are the constraints? What are the priorities?

After some conversation, tea, coffee, and cigarettes, we agreed on the following parameters:

  • To have two to four candidates, ideally four
  • To have candidates with very different profiles (different ways of looking at contemporary web culture
  • To have at least one candidate from each gender
  • At least one candidate from outside of Europe
  • At least one candidate from Germany
  • At least one candidate for digital journalism, one for web design, and one for web development
  • Is the candidate a single person or a group? (Ideally, we would like to have both kinds)
  • To have a range of ages amongst the chosen candidates

Of course, these parameters are not rigid. Nevertheless, they helped guide us along the way.

2. What are our questions?

Going through the material and links submitted by the candidate, we marked down our most frequently recurring questions:

  • Is there enough material to evaluate the candidate?
  • Does the candidate understand the nature of the institution and the nature of the fellowship?
  • Is the candidate an interesting person? Would they add value to the Akademie?
  • Would we like to have them contribute to the new digital magazine of Akademie Schloss Solitude, which will be launched in November this year?
  • Is the professional network of the candidate strong?
  • Would the candidate become an agent of communication for new worlds/areas/fields?
  • Does the candidate have a good presence and activity on social media channels?
  • How good is their English language proficiency?

3. Further questions (to be addressed by the Akademie)

We then wrote down a second series of questions.

The first set of questions (previous paragraph) were the questions for the candidate.

This second set were the questions to be addressed by the people in charge of the Akademie.

  • Is the traditional process (to select fellows) also viable for digital fellowships?
  • How does this fellowship work within the broader frame of the Akademie further exploring the world of time-based and social media?
  • Going through the process, do we have new ideas and inspiration (regarding the broader goals of the institution in terms of its changing relationship with online and digital media)?

3. Who were the applicants?

Here is the first series of interesting information.

Most of the applicants chose the category digital journalism.

Applicants were distributed evenly in terms of gender. The age group 30-35 was the most represented.

We received a lot of applications from Germany and Italy, which reflects the nationality of the institution and the jurors.

The applicants’ backgrounds are very heterogeneous, but we could say that most of them have a background in humanities, rather than technology.

4. The selection of candidates

The Akademie received around 100 applications for review.

The first selection was made via question 1 (Is there enough material to evaluate the candidate?). After the first jury round, 63 people remained.

The second selection was made via question 2 (Does the candidate understand the nature of the institution and the nature of the fellowship?). 36 people remained after the second jury round.

The third selection was made via questions 3 and 4 (Is this candidate an interesting person? Would they add value to the Akademie? + Would we like to have them contribute to the new digital magazine of Solitude?). 33 remained after the third jury round.

These 33 applicants were very strong candidates: interesting people, interesting activities + interesting proposals.

By the way, the first outcome of this selection was to find 33 potentially excellent contributors for the new digital magazine of Solitude, interesting people carrying out interesting activities and research.

5. How to select the final candidates

Then we went on to ask the remaining questions (the ones mentioned in paragraph 2).

  • Is the professional network of the candidate strong?
  • Would the candidate become an agent of communication for new worlds/areas/fields?
  • Does the candidate have a good presence and activity on social media channels?
  • How good is their English language proficiency?

After this new round of questions, we were left with 13 excellent candidates.

Each of them would have been a great fellow, yet we had to decide on four.

In order to work out whom to keep, we used our first parameters of selection (the ones mentioned in paragraph 1). From here on, we were no longer searching for the best candidates. Instead, we were trying to form a strong group of four different people.

This is the most important step in the whole process: to look for the best candidates, who would also form a strong group of very capable people.

Our assumption was that the potential relations between the chosen fellows are an even more important criterion.

In future, we would also like to invite the best candidates after the jury round (here 33 out of the 100 total) to contribute to the blog and to feature some candidates (here 13 out of the 33) in a blog contribution from the jurors that would show their talent and excellent work.

When you are in a jury you have access to a great amount of fantastic content. We are considering how we could find a way to share this valuable material with everyone in the Akademie’s network.

6. Our final selection

So going back to the beginning, we returned to our starting parameters for the 13 remaining candidates, trying to achieve the best mix:

  • To have very different profiles (different ways of looking at contemporary web culture)
  • To have at least one candidate from each gender
  • At least one candidate from outside of Europe
  • At least one candidate from Germany
  • At least one candidate for digital journalism, one for web design, and one for web development
  • Is the candidate a single person or a group? (Ideally, we would like to have both kinds)
  • To have a range of ages amongst the chosen candidates

In order to fulfill all the above requirements, we chose four candidates:

Andrius Lekavicius, Adityan Melekalam, Netro, Elisabeth Weydt. With this line-up, we fulfill most of the original parameters (all of them except age range; all the chosen candidates are in their early 30s).

7. Why we like them?

We chose:

Andrius Lekavicius (digital journalism) because of his ability to mix culture with commercial and marketing spirit, which could be very interesting in a place like Akademie Schloss Solitude. Also he has a good sense of humour, an interesting ingredient in the environment of a well-established European cultural institution.

Adityan Melekalam (web design) because of his ability to mix analog and digital culture. It was very fascinating to see his essays in the form of conceptual websites. Simple and complex, analog and digital. There are a lot of paradoxes in his work, which we like. The fact that he has a CV where excellent cultural institutions mix with global corporations is another element of interest.

Netro.cc (web development) because of their ability to create projects as if they were news themselves (don’t write news on something; make something that is itself news). Some of their very interesting projects question well established frames of cultural production.

Elisabeth Weydt (digital journalism) because of her ability to explore established realms of new digital journalism. Her interest lies in topics such as civil society, which together with her journalistic skills makes her a very important part of the overall dynamic.

8. What we learned:

If a similar call will be done in the future, we could:

  • reflect on the areas/disciplines of selection
  • ask the participants to submit an article for the Akademie’s new digital magazine Schlosspost as a part of the application process
  • ask the participants for permission to share their website and social media links, also in the case that they are not selected
  • start to experiment with new digital communication tools (a press conference with Periscope, etc.)

If you are still reading…

It means that you are very interested in the process of selection in the age of time-based and social media. We would be happy to hear your opinion.

Do you agree with the process we have set up?
Would you have done something – or maybe everything – differently?

We are happy to hear your thoughts!

Clara Herrmann,

Alessandro Mininno, @alekone (on Twitter),

Stefano Mirti, @stefi_idlab (on Twitter and Instagram)