Following on from the earlier conversation on the Women's Prize For Fiction deciding that women were passé...

(here: https://ovarit.com/o/Books/5640/womens-prize-for-fiction-isnt-sure-what-a-woman-is)

Quoting my own post(s):

I guess we could just do an ovarit prize for fiction where we nominate books we like that have been written by women, and poll for a winner, if enough people are interested in that. ... there have been other online awards over the years for literature that doesn't meet criteria for official awards, so I know roughly how it could work:

There's a thread for nominations. This is kept open for some set amount of time, and anyone with an account can post a nomination.

People volunteer to be judges. Each judge reads all nominations, picks their fave, and votes for it. Book with most votes wins! If there's a tie, they battle it out in a discussion thread. They must reply by a set time or they get booted off so that things don't get stuck waiting for them to return.

(Can be an intermediary shortlisting step if needed, or different genres with different judges and prizes per-genre, if there are too many noms, etc. But probably easiest to start by keeping it simple)

my vague thought was to start by suggesting we nominate women who've already signed the letter of solidarity with jkr

( and @dasehe also pointed out Woman4W's tweet about crowdfunding prizes for women who lose out to men in cases where men are unfairly admitted and favoured in women's competitions: https://twitter.com/Woman4W/status/1313111003262070786 . So that'd be a cool thing to do in parallel)

Would anyone like to work together on this, etc? If we don't want to imply it's specific to (or endorsed by) Ovarit itself we could call it the Wimpund Prize for Fiction or something.

Misc practical thing I'm wondering about: as far as I'm aware, one thing ovarit doesn't really do is hilight when threads update; this is more a feature of forum software (think discourse, or proboards, or 'the way mumsnet works'). So once a thread drops from the front page, very few people will see it, and most people won't notice if there are new comments. For a nominations thread it's enough to keep it sticky, but for a discussion thread that's expected to persist for any length of time, it's probably more important to know when it updates. So wondering what we should do there. I think any discussion should be visible for anyone who wants to read, so something like a discord wouldn't work very well for that (plus that doesn't really cater to longform text). In the past when I've seen these kinds of things done online, it's been on forums.

If nothing else, we should end up with some good book recommendations! :) Feel free to share thoughts.