How judging works
Published in full, because a judgement nobody can inspect is not worth holding.
Every eligible nomination is scored independently by at least 3 judges against six criteria, each out of ten, and weighted to a mark out of 100.0. The weights are published below and fixed before a season opens.
The audience discovers, PALMA evaluates, judges decide. Nomination volume identifies who is worth investigating and stops there. Nothing in the judging path reads it, so a creator with ten thousand nominations does not beat one with two thousand. Audience size, follower count and view count are not criteria and never will be.
- 01
Achievement and performance
25%scored /10What was actually accomplished in the eligibility window.
The work itself, at its own level of ambition. A modest project executed completely scores above an ambitious one that did not land. Judge what was made, not what was announced.
- 02
Creative quality and originality
20%scored /10Craft, and distinctiveness of the ideas behind it.
Would this be recognisable as theirs with the name removed? Score the ideas and the form they take, not how unusual the subject happens to be this year, and not production budget.
- 03
Impact and influence
20%scored /10What changed because this work exists.
Practice other creators picked up, a subject taken seriously, a standard raised. Reach is not impact: a piece seen by a hundred thousand people that changed nothing scores below one seen by five thousand that changed how a form is made.
- 04
Consistency and body of work
15%scored /10Sustained quality and output across the window.
One exceptional piece is not a body of work. Look for quality held across the season, and do not penalise a deliberately small output that is uniformly strong.
- 05
Audience and community significance
10%scored /10What the work means to the people it reached.
Not how many. This is the criterion most easily misread, so it is put plainly: score what the work means to the community around it: whether it gave people something they did not have, whether it is defended and passed on. Follower counts, subscriber numbers and view counts are not evidence for this criterion and must be disregarded.
- 06
Category fit
10%scored /10How squarely the work sits in the category it was entered in.
Excellent work in the wrong category is still in the wrong category. This is not a penalty for range. It asks whether this category is where the work should be judged, and it is the criterion that keeps a strong creator from sweeping every category they are named in.
Aggregation
Once four or more judges have scored a nomination, the highest and lowest scores are removed before ranking. Panels disagree, and a single outlier, enthusiastic or hostile, should not decide a PALMA. Where judges disagree sharply, the chair sees the spread before any list is confirmed.
The top 4 eligible candidacies in each category are proposed as finalists. The ranking is a recommendation: confirming it is a human act, performed by an authorised administrator, and written to the audit log with the state before and after.
Conflicts of interest
A judge declares a conflict; they do not argue one. The moment a relationship is declared, the judge is removed from that candidacy. Only an explicit dismissal by an administrator restores them, and both acts are recorded. Judges declare against these categories:
- Personal relationship
- Commercial relationship
- Representation or management
- Employment
- Direct competitor
- Other
Immutability
A submitted score cannot be changed by the judge who gave it. If a genuine error is found, an authorised administrator performs a controlled correction which preserves the original score, the corrected score, who changed it and why.
Sponsors
Sponsorship is a commercial relationship recorded against a season or a category. It confers no access to nominations, judges, scores or outcomes. This is enforced in the permission model, not by convention: sponsors hold no role in the system at all.
What is never published
Individual scores, panel deliberations, remarks to the chair and nomination evidence. PALMA publishes outcomes, not the arguments behind them.