This document outlines the Exemplar Program which aims to recognize judges for their excellent work through personalized recognition rather than standardized rewards like judge foils. It discusses expanding recognition beyond just senior judges to all levels by allowing them to recognize peers for achievements in events, community-building, leadership, mentoring, and learning from failures. The goal is for recognition to be based on specific exemplary behaviors rather than just showing up to receive rewards.

1. The Exemplar Program
From the judges
To the judges

2. A (small) history of Judge Foils?
• Judge Foils were created to thank judges for
their involvement in the community
• Back to their creation (10 years ago), they
were used to thank judges who were so
invested they travelled far away to GPs.
• Since then, they’ve remained attached to GPs.
• And they progressively turned into a form of
compensation.
• This is pretty far from their original purpose.

3. Recognition VS Reward
• Reward: « Do X, get Y »
– No matter how you did
– Y is defined upfront
• Recognition: « That’s awesome! Congrats! »
– Based on excellence
• Admittedly, the difference is subtle. An example:
– Right now, by just showing up at a GP, you get foils. You can
excel or be average, it doesn’t change anything to this fact.
– However, how do you happen to get one of the special
recognitions from the HJ at the end of the week-end?

4. Expanding Recognitions
• A Program tested for two years already
– GP HJ recognitions (started in 2012)
– L4+ quarterly recognitions (started in 2013)
– RC recognitions
• Posted on Social Media, unlike GP foils.
• Accompanied by a personalized word, unlike
GP foils

5. Recognize your peers
• Until now, only Senior Judges could recognize
– L5s, L4s, RCs
• In the future, we’ll entitle all L2+s
– Adding L3s
– Adding L2s
• SJs alone can’t know all those who did great
• But with L2s and L3s, we all can.
• A pilot test has been run in the past months
• Exemplar Program to be fully deployed in 2015

6. What can be recognized?
• ANYTHING! YOU get to make that decision!
– Awesome Event performance
– Excellent Community enhancement
– Outstanding Leadership
– Inspiring Mentoring
– What about Failures?
– And many more…
• Keep in mind:
– YOU decide what YOU have liked
– This is not Reward, this is Recognition
• Recognition is about behavior

7. Events
• Thanks for being HJ at PTQ
• Thanks for driving a few hours to come to PTQ
• Thanks for stepping up at PTQ [X]. When we
got more players than expected, I appreciated
how you remained calm and poised. Your
leadership kept the players happy at a time of
potential crisis. Nobody panicked and it was
thanks in large part to your calm.

8. Community
• Thanks for being the moderator of our local
forums.
• Your involvement in managing players’
reactions to the recent major announcement
has been awesome. You’ve successfully
achieved making most of them understand
the reasons behind the last changes and
defused some unfair attacks.

9. Leadership
• Thanks for being Team Lead at that Grand Prix
• Thanks for your inspiring briefing at the
beginning of round 5. The day was pretty
rough and we really needed to find more
energy to reach its end. You managed to make
us forget the issues we went through and
make us laugh.

10. Mentoring
• Thanks for the review ;)
• I would like to thank you for your efficient
mentoring during that GPT I was the HJ for.
Your insight was very valuable, especially
when you helped me making a decision in that
“Player A says/Player B says” situation.

11. Failures
• Processes constantly improve.
• First try at something new often fails.
– End of Round procedure (Riccardo, Nottingham 05)
– Checking DL before counting (Kevin, Madrid 12)
– Multi-spot EOR procedure (Sergio P, Strasbourg 2013)
• Failures are a Fertile Ground for later success
• Failing is awesome as long as great conclusions
are drawn from the failure.
• We learn and improve by making mistakes!

12. Let’s try!
• Let’s figure out some examples
– Related to Events?
– Related to Community?
– Related to Leadership?
– Related to Mentoring?
– Related to failures?
– Got other ideas?

13. Conclusions
• Recognition is not about getting something,
it’s being thanked for a specific behaviour.
• It’s not about performing a task, it’s about
going above and beyond.
• YOU can now decide who deserves to be
recognized and WHY!