Organizational Challenge: Announcing the Winners!

A big thank-you to everyone who took the time to help us with our organizational challenge over the past couple of weeks. With more than 100 people completing the topic-sorting exercise, your response verged on the overwhelming, yielding some 5,000 lines of data that Alex and I have already spent several days analyzing.

Forty of you zipped through the exercise in under 10 minutes, while another 10 plugged away for more than half an hour. A special mention for perseverance goes to “mkw2” for spending 152 minutes on the exercise – though hopefully that total included a nap, or at least a cappuccino.

It was fascinating to see the ways everyone’s thoughts converged as well as where you had differences of opinion (indicating that we may need to rename those pages). And we also learned to steer clear of generic category names like “Information” and “Resources” – which nearly always turn out to be grab bags of unrelated links.  We enjoyed some of your creative category names, including “Breeding Birders,”  “CLO…’The Lab’… call it what you will, this is what we are,” and simply “Doing Bird Things.”

But I can feel your impatience growing: Who won the three prizes in our random drawing of participants?  Here you go: (feel free to drum your thumbs on your desk)

The winners are:

Third prize (FeederWatcher’s Guide to Backyard Birds): goes to the mysterious “dezzin1”

Second prize (The Grail Bird or Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds): Martha Landis

First prize (any three audio CDs from the Macaulay Library): Liz Pomper

Congratulations to all the winners – and thanks to everyone for being so generous with your time and brainpower!

Note to winners: We’ve already sent you a notification by e-mail. If you haven’t heard from us, your spam blocker may have filtered out the message. Please contact me (Hugh) at hdp8@cornell.edu. If prizes remain unclaimed for three weeks, we’ll pick another winner.