What is the International Judge Program?
The International Judge Program is a community-driven, nonprofit association for judges from all around the world, with the goal of providing certification and education to its members and creating an inclusive and welcoming environment.
Why do we exist?
Because we believe in judges, and we think the best way of building the future of the Judge Program is providing judges a platform that they own and are be part of.
With the announcement of the end of Judge Academy we started to search and evaluate options to provide European judges a common operational framework (like Judge Foundry did for US and Canada). We knew there were local initiatives in different countries, and we wanted to support these initiatives and judges as a whole by providing an international structure.
In the process, we realized we had the option to expand our initial goal, from Europe only, to cover judges from any part of the world, so we decided to explore this idea further. Not all countries or regions have the possibility or the means to develop their own organizations, and we feel that having a global entity to support our fellow judges and keep our community together is important.
Research was successful… and here we are! In the end, the more we are, the more resources and experience we’ll have to deal with future needs and challenges. We are different, but we are one.
What do we do?
First of all, we provide a legal framework to keep our international community connected and united. We believe both local and global organizations are needed to support our judge community. We hope to cover that need by cooperating with and supporting local organizations (regardless of them being a legal entity or just a group of judges organizing themselves together). At the same time, we wish to keep a global perspective and cohesion. We have no intention to supersede other regional organizations, but to complement and support them.
Of course, we also aim to be a point of contact for publishers and international TOs to make sure we work towards providing them with well-prepared event specialists for their different OP needs, and will manage the different resources we get to achieve our association goals. Since we know you’ll want to know: no, we don’t have judge foils support, and we have to operate with this reality. We’ll do our best to get as many resources we can to support our initiative, but we want to be clear with our current situation, since we believe in transparency to build trust.
Additionally, we aim to contribute positively to judges education and development in a number of different ways:
- We are working on providing and maintaining a level-based certification system to ensure judges have an inspiring and clear development path while TOs have a reliable system to assist them in identifying the different baseline skills to staff their events. We understand different regions have different needs and, therefore, some levels might require special care and adjustments, while keeping the general philosophy. We already have future posts scheduled to elaborate more on this aspect.
- We will promote and support organizing judge conferences, both as community meeting opportunities and as key events for educational exchange and judges self-development.
- We will provide means and support to judge projects and inspiring ideas that improve our community at either local or international level.
- We want to go back to basics by fostering community mentorship and feedback as judges core values at all levels.
Last but not least, we will work to recognize judges’ achievements. Our success as a judge community association will depend on the support and the passion of our volunteer members, and we believe public recognition and highlighting exemplary behaviors should be an important part of our organization.
What's next?
Our current focus is on finishing the administrative and financial details we need to close the legal aspects and constitute the association.
We’re currently shaping the statutes of the association and will assign an initial and temporary board of leaders to ensure a smooth development of the association during the first months. We will share with you these details as soon as we have them ready.
One of our major goals is building trust through transparency and continuous communications. There are many aspects about the future we don’t know about yet, and we only ask for an initial leap of faith on our founding members and the ideas we are sharing. We will soon start accepting members and have our first meetings with the different regional organizations and publishers. At this point, we’ll have a better idea of the initiative impact and needs, and we’ll share it with you to be able to work in shaping the future together.
In the next few days we’ll make a first call for volunteers to start expanding our operational team. If you’re already inspired and willing to take part in supporting our first steps, we’ll be glad to hear from you. Please, stay tuned 🙂
