ARLnow is thinking about bringing back The Arlies, but under a different name and with a new way to vote.
We paused the Arlington Community Awards program two-and-a-half years ago to re-think how best to differentiate it from other local awards. Another consideration: how to encourage more people to vote while discouraging repeat voting.
Now, as we near the latter half of 2024, we think we might have the answer to both. The current plan is to:
- Rebrand The Arlies as the ARLnow Readers’ Choice awards
- Vote on one category each week, throughout the year, using the same voting system as Morning Poll posts like this one (the Arlies used a survey system, in which one had to click a link and then vote by typing in an answer)
- Have up to 10 choices for each category, selected via automatic qualification (highest rated on Yelp, etc.) and reader nomination (with annual promotion/relegation depending on nominations/votes received the prior year)
- Utilize our voting system’s ability to disqualify instances of repeat voting from the same computer
- Announce the official winners for the previous week in each weekly voting post
The other local awards are great, but voting for and then announcing the winners all at once is perhaps not ideal. We believe that voting for one category at a time, while showing the unofficial results in real time, could be more fun and not as overwhelming — while encouraging voting from a broader swath of Arlington residents.
What do you think?
