The first Golden Steem Awards are finally done. A little late, but last night I tallied up the liquid rewards that made up the prizes and performed the transfers to winners.
Now it's time to reflect on how it went and gather your feedback for the future.
The winners presentation, in case you missed it
Discovering and Promoting Authors
Personally, I think this was the biggest success. I went through every nomination and encountered some amazing people posting great things that I would have had otherwise missed. Only a single entry was later found to be plagiarized, so that was great too.
I hope that others found the same thing and discovered new people to follow. I'm thinking about creating a curation bot that will automatically resteem every post from authors that were nominated to the first edition of the awards. Would you follow it?
About the winners, it was great to see the effect it had on them. I personally talked to 
The Nomination, Voting, and Judging Process
From the start, I wanted this to be a people's choice kind of award. People would nominate their favorite things, and people would select the best among those.
I feel that the nomination process went well. I was happy with the number of nominations and variety. A good mix of self-promotion and recognition. It should be extra special to have someone else nominate your work, maybe even someone you follow and respect, which you can see happening in the nomination thread.
One of the initial concerns would be to only have the usual suspects nominated, but it was plentiful and varied.
Voting was OK. I believe that separating nominating from voting was a good decision, as it gives everyone the same time to be voted on.
Counting vote value versus the number of votes is something that bothered me a bit. When first designing the awards I thought about counting the number of votes, but it's too easy to abuse. I decided to go with the value of votes, even if that may leave the decision on the hands of fewer people, that's the Steemit way. I wish I had communicated that clearer before, as a couple people came to ask me about that.
Having judges to pick a winner between the top four finalists is a way to alleviate that, and also to create some suspense for the Steemfest winners announcement. I think it worked well and 
It's been suggested to me to have more technical judges specific for each category, and judge all nominations, not only the top four voted. Personally, I liked the mix of people's opinion and judge's preference, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on that. What do you think?
The Categories
GSA started as an original fiction award but
I received some feedback asking about different categories. Poetry and Food are popular, also Travel. I guess I could have included more but didn't want to have too many, and five felt right.
Art was the most popular one, followed by photography. Fiction didn't have as many nominations as the others, but they were good ones. Life Advice might have been a little ambiguous, but I was happy to let the community decide what it meant through nominating and voting.
Undiscovered Author was my favorite one from the start. $200 SBD was an arbitrary mark I came up to be considered undiscovered, and I think that was fine. Probably next time I'll make it a virtual category that includes everyone that has been nominated for any other category and fits the criteria.
Looking for feedback here as well. How many categories should the next Award have? Which ones do you think should be included?
The Winners Presentation
Presenting on Steemfest was a blast. Calling some Steemit celebrities on stage to present each category was fun even if unscripted and unrehearsed. I think it worked out well.
Awarding people that were present was the best part, and we should probably have arranged some physical trophies for that.
The Prizes
Even though the STEEM/SBD prize was secondary to the honor of winning, it was a little underwhelming. Even though every post had a few hundred votes, they didn't attract many whales so they raised 127.485 STEEM and 5.07 SBD in total, which were divided among the winners.
I guess that's OK, no one was expecting anything more. Maybe someone wants to sponsor next edition?
Golden Steem Awards II
Speaking about the next edition, I already had a couple people ask me about it. I'm still not sure what to do. Maybe wait for next Steemfest? Or have it online only every three months (or six?), then a special Steemfest edition?
Also considered a continuous award platform that would allow users to nominate and recognize excellent authors and works. Not quite like Curie or other curation projects, more like a feature author spotlight. Haven't thought much about it, maybe it's redundant.
What do you think? When should be the next edition of the Golden Steem Awards?