Submission phase

To start with, it’s up to the public to suggest candidates in all of the Bobs categories and 14 languages.

• Only blogs and sites in the contest’s 14 languages can be admitted to the competition. The languages are: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian.
• You may submit yourself
• Websites must be accessible to the public.
• Websites from the Deutsche Welle or its employees are not allowed in the competition.
• Websites in which jury members are closely and directly involved are not allowed in the competition.
• We do not accept submissions that contain or link to any form of insulting, racist, sexist or in any other way discriminatory or obscene content.
• Deutsche Welle employees and BOBs jury members may suggest sites and blogs to the competition.
• To participate in the contest, a site need only be submitted to the Bobs once. The number of times a site is submitted to the contest does not influence its chances of advancing to the next round or its chances of winning.

Nomination phase

The jury decides on the finalists

Each jury member receives a list of all suggested sites in his or her language and gets down to analyzing and rating them to come up with a list of finalists. The 10 finalists in  the language-specific categories (Best Blog, Best Person to Follow) are determined by corresponding language’s jury member.

Multilingual categories each receive one finalists of each of the Bobs’ 14 languages. We chose to whittle each multilingual category’s finalists down to a total of 14 to make sure each Bobs language is represented. Should a jury member choose not to suggest a blog to a certain category, that language’s spot in the multilingual category will be filled by a selection from another language to ensure that there are 14 finalists in all the categories.

The Bobs team consists of native-speaking editors in each of the contest’s languages. While the jury members act independently, Bobs team members are available to lend a hand as necessary.

Voting phase

It’s up to the Internet-using public to vote on the winners of the User Prize in all the contest’s categories.

• The voting phase begins when The Bobs panel of international bloggers and media experts name the nominees in each of the contest’s categories.
• Voting is allowed once per category, per 24 hours, per network.
• You may vote for yourself.
• Voting results will decide the User Prize winners in all 34 categories.
• Separately and independently, the jury will name the winners of the Jury Award in the six multilingual categories.

In order to reach their decision on who should receive The Bobs Jury Award, jury panel members are invited to a two-day meeting in Berlin, Germany. If a jury member cannot be present, a Bobs team member fills in and represents the juror’s wishes. The jury members discuss and decide on the winners in the multilingual categories. A Deutsche Welle employee, who does not have a regular vote, chairs the meeting.

A number of rounds of voting decided by simple majority produce a winner. The meeting’s chair casts tie-breaking votes, if necessary.

Jurors present the sites in their language to the rest of the jury panel. A round of preliminary voting reduces the number of finalists to three. These three sites are put up for further discussion before a second round of voting decides the two final candidates. After a final round of discussions votes are cast to determine the Jury Award winner.

All winners are announced on this website.