TCT Hall of Fame shortlist.
Today the TCT Group announced the shortlist for the inaugural Hall of Fame (HoF), and I'm certain there will be cries of "Why wasn't this person included?" or "Why is such and such in the list?"
Believe me, we've been back and forth at TCT Towers, agonising over the right way to do this. We've done most influential lists before and we've been aware of the perils that come with creating a list like this.
At the same time as wanting this to be an entirely fair selection of the greatest people that have led the 3D technologies industry to a point of almost ubiquity, we knew we needed to get this right and opening it up to public vote from the get go, in this day and age, is simply too risky. Why? Because of trolls.
In a previous role I worked at Birmingham City Football Club, the club decided (for some bizarre reason) that they wanted a new anthem as the players stepped out from the tunnel. They opened it up for a public vote, what happened? The fans of local rivals, Aston Villa, hijacked it and the Birdy Song won out. Birmingham had a sense of humour about it but ultimately, after a brief Coldplay Viva La Vida moment, they conducted another vote exclusively to their own fans. This trolling happens pretty much every time when a poll goes to the internet, Boaty McBoatface anyone?
We still want this to be a public decision. So from that point what do we need to do to keep away from trolls? Form a shortlist. Can we do that ourselves at TCT? Sure, and I'm currently staring at a list of names on a whiteboard that we wrote down when the planning began way back in September 2016. But even with about 60 years of combined 3D experience on the team, we're but shoots in comparison to some in the industry and we don't want to be accused of bias.
To the board mobile
With this in mind, we set about first forming the TCT Expert Advisory Board, something we've had previously at TCT but nowhere near as extensive as the current list of 25 names. We chose people from the spectrum of sectors that help shape the industry; consultants, OEM inventors, journalists, material scientists, users, professors, people in plastics, some in metals... the list goes on.
Those people are tasked with helping steer TCT's output and their first major job was to pick the shortlist for the HoF. Each got ten votes, and the most popular ten became our shortlist to go out to the public. Five of that ten will be inducted on the 27th September 2017.
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What's important to remember is this isn't it; the TCT Hall of Fame is not a closed shop, it is here to stay, we will be inducting more in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 ad infinitum.
