The heart and soul of the quarterly Diarist Awards program is the Finalist Selection Panel. Every round, we need nine ambitious, curious, and determined escribitionists (online journalers, personal webloggers, and their kin) to carefully review all the nominees  often more than two hundred individual entries  and tackle the nearly impossible task of selecting their favorites to put forward as finalists.

Thank you very much for considering volunteering for this challenging but ultimately rewarding task. Please be sure you are familiar with the awards process, and reviewed the panel guide, which explains the panel's procedures and timeline in more detail. (These links will open new windows.)

Please be aware that serving on the panel constitutes a significant time committment, and as specific duties come in to play at different stages, we recommend volunteering only if you have no unusual or special committments pending during the same time period. If there is a queue of volunteers and you are asked to serve on a later panel, of course you will have the opportunity to decide then if your schedule will allow it.

For all your work, what are the benefits? Sure, you'll be linked on the panel page (thereby earning the respect and admiration of everyone else who knows what serving is like), and you'll enjoy discussing and debating the state of the art (and anything else) with your fellow panelists. But more importantly, you will be in a unique position to visit and actually explore dozens of personal sites that you may never have discovered otherwise, to read a diverse collection of excellent and often unforgettable writing, and of course to be the first to know who the finalists are, and who the winners will be.

Panels are generally assembled first-come, first-served, but demographics are sometimes factored in to ensure balance (for example, most panels have a female-to-male ratio of 4-to-1). Please provide as much information as you can.