Selection Process
The Process 🎈
This is where the fun starts. Fun you cry?! While we are a highly regarded awards programme, this doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the process along the way. We hope you agree there’s nothing more exciting than raising awareness of positive drone use cases and demonstrating how Life’s Better With Drones!
Airwards is judged by an incredible group of thought leaders 💡 and highly esteemed experts 🎓 in their fields. We strive to ensure that we have all the particular expertise necessary to cover every category as well as matching our judges’ expertise to those categories in order to guarantee that every entry gets as thorough and fair an evaluation as possible.
In order to fulfil this, we have outlined certain eligibility criteria and rules which are required.
Eligibility refers to the characteristics and experience necessary in our judges, to be selected and in a suitable position to judge.
Rules refers to the conduct when judging, to ensure our high awards standards are maintained.
Eligibility
All judges (old and new) must meet our eligibility criteria every year. We also aim to grow our panel annually, to ensure it represents the diversity of categories and the global nature of our awards. We challenge our judges to engage in serious debate when considering each entry, so we value having different perspectives on board.
When contemplating becoming an Airwards Judge, you should consider that we are looking for judges to:
✨ Mirror the ethos of Airwards, criteria and sub criteria standards of best practice, as well as our mission to raise awareness of positive drone use cases and demonstrate how Life’s Better With Drones.
💞 Be impartial, unbiased, fair and pragmatic. Put competition to one side and come together as a unique group to recognise and award use cases.
🧩 Have knowledge, skills and/or experience in at least three of the categories.
📚 Be considerate of our accessibility EDI driver to all entrants and give due fairness and consideration to entries which may come from less than two people (i.e. a small company with limited resources), and those whose first language may not be English.
🍾 Be part of Airwards’ digital and physical activities. It is important that the judges engage with finalists, sponsors and guests and be accessible to them.
We have quotas we are striving to achieve to make Airwards as accessible and fair an opportunity, available to all experts and leaders to judge. We therefore aim to achieve representation as outlined on our welcome page here.
Judges can come from all sorts of places (provided they meet our eligibility criteria) including, but not limited to: Drone Start-ups / SMEs / Enterprise size companies, Corporate partners (offered as a package / limited to two spaces per year), Winners from People’s Choice and Main Categories.
Rules
These are different from the eligibility of becoming an Airwards judge and are the rules we expect all judges to be bound by while judging. If any of these are broken or a judge is found to have breached them, then the instance will be reviewed and may result in expulsion as an Airwards Judge and, depending on the severity, a lifetime ban. More of this can be found once an individual is accepted to being a Judge.
Expectations 📝
We have outlined several of these ☑️ to help both you and us remain on the same page at all times. These include but are not limited to aspects we hope you’ll experience and take out of the process along the way, and things we hope to see from you. By being involved in Airwards, we ultimately hope that you will ‘Wonder, Share, Delight and Discover’.
More of this can be found once an individual is accepted to being a Judge.
Airwards is judged by an esteemed group of industry leaders and experts. The judging is a rigorous process where entries are evaluated in detail to determine the winners.
Our application form aims to make judging as fair and accessible a process as possible. We try to ensure we have global representations as well as experts for each of our categories who align with Airwards' vision and mission. We also endeavour to be representative and accessible to all, however, with limited spaces each year, we are regrettably unable to accept every applicant. If that is the case, your application will remain on our system and we may be in touch in future.
Our 20/21 and 21/22 application forms have closed so please REGISTER HERE for Year 3.
